Gallivanting around the States

A couple of weeks ago my cousin got married.  When we got the invitation, I let one of my wild hairs rule my thought process, and decided I should go! I also decided to take one child with me.  The great debate, which one?  Through a process of weighing pros and cons, the situation changing and me chauffeuring my grandparents to the wedding, then re evaluating it all again, it was Sweetness who went this time.

We took a rocket ship off the moon (since that is where we live) and landed in the lush grasses of the Midwest.

We got to meet up with another cousin of mine and her little one:

The wedding was held in a beautiful park and it turns out I took absolutely no pictures of the wedding.

And the reception had bowling!

Lots of family!  Grandma and Grandpa had all 5 daughters there! And the Mother of the Groom is in pink. It was a great wedding and weekend!

Everyone got to catch up a bit.

 Simple things that bring us the most joy!

We had a fun time driving around with Grandma and Grandpa.  They showed us new tricks, like how suction works with windows while driving down the interstate. Grandpa owes Grandma a new green towel. And Sweetness loved having Grandpa read books to her, and she quickly caught on to any page skipping he tried to pull.

In fact, all my aunts mentioned throughout the weekend how Grandpa has the best reading voice and one of their favorite childhood memories is of him reading to them. They also mentioned this page skipping thing has been going on for a long while!



And this brings us to the update on Sweetness.  I can spin it as a graduation or her first dropout from school. I can say it was just too much hassle for me to do the preschool runs or the price was too high.  However, the truth is not only was she bored, she was unhappy.  When discussing with her teacher, her teacher said that in class she is just sad. All the time sad.  The best they can get out of her is a thumbs up or thumbs down and sometimes when they ask her a simple "how was your weekend?" question she bursts into tears.  The words her teacher used were, painfully shy. Sweetness might be reserved and not a chatter box, but she is not painfully shy.  Something else was going on that she was so unhappy at preschool that she was shutting down.  Academically she is ready for kindergarten. She wants to keep doing "school at home with mommy". So we will continue to work on things. When I told her this would be her last week, only 3 more days, I saw her whole body relax and lift as if the world had been lifted from her shoulders.


Sweetness, on her last day of preschool:

We were all giddy!

"You are worried about seeing him spend his early years in doing nothing. What! Is it nothing to be happy? Nothing to skip, play, and run around all day long? Never in his life will he be so busy again." Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762