In this day and age where Facebook artificially filters a rosy picture of life and social media allows us the illusion of community while fostering new kind of loneliness, it is important to underscore that our blogs are written to capture the beauty and memory of childhood for Curie and Elia. We are thankful for the family and lives we have but to assume that it is easy or somehow more idyllic than another family would be a mistake. All families have their triumphs and challenges, every person has their achievements and their crosses to bear. We struggle to hold it together and muddle through life and parenting like any other family. It is however the celebration of joy that helps us get through the trials we are given and it is beauty of the mundane that keeps the dreariness of routine at bay. We are just as jealous of beach resort vacations and trips abroad that others have, but that does not keep us from wringing every drop of happiness we can from each ordinary day with our family.
We have not had a vacation in some time and, to be honest, have not been able to plan the kind of vacation we want because we are buying a house again. The trips we have taken have all been mostly family or work related, “oblic-ations” as it were. They are fun and we have great memories and pictures, but it is not quite the same as getting away and relaxing or having a moment to decompress. The most recent trip was flying up to Massachusetts for Julie and Steve’s wedding. Yes, there was the stress of helping put on the wedding, working through the dynamics of family, friends, and Julie and Steve’s friends, but for the girls it was magical. For Curie, it was a highlight of the year for her.
The girls have had their flower girl dresses for months and have not been allowed to wear them other than the first time to see if they fit. They have worn their gold shoes in the house almost every day leading up to the wedding. They gushed and glowed when buying tiaras, and were delighted to pick out an unplanned blue stone necklace – an amulet as it were to wear at the wedding. We bought matching rehearsal dinner dresses for Erin and the kids and went out of the way to make sure Albert matched on both days. We were by far the most over-dressed people at the rehearsal dinner, but when do you get to play dress-up like that in public anymore (the answer from our kids would be every day, why not?) so we didn’t care.
At the wedding, they were a little nervous and Elia, which we will detail more in her blog, wanted to be carried, but once the ceremony was over and Julie and Steve were married (and all the speeches done) the girls attention turned to the buffet, their cousins, and dancing! We do a dance party almost every other night with moves like Jagger, and Browne, and ballet and contemporary dance. We father-daughter, mother-daughter, king and queen, prince and princess, belle and beast, so when the music came on early in the reception, the girls were ready to bust-a-move. They danced all night, and would have begged for more. There are pictures, there are videos, there are memories and laughter and fun. What a night.
Curie will be ending school soon and our worries on reading have led us right to the end with her leaping from 8s to 12s to 14s in a short time. It is because she is a year younger and while that will pose its challenges in and of itself it also will push her to try harder and to be better much as it had for Albert and others in her situation. Her critical thinking, joy for school, and innate intelligence are not diminished by her being young. To wit, Curie explained that the reason that it was so cold in spring was that we did not have snow earlier in winter effectively summarizing the effects of climate change on weather and the seasons. On Erin’s trip she was particularly mature telling Elia and Albert to turn it down a notch, and she has been especially helpful cleaning and cooking and setting the table and more, much as a reaction to Elia’s unwillingness to do the same, but also because she is maturing and growing.
This is the first time Curie picked out her own pictures for her collage (out of a subset that we picked out first). She belt tested successfully into yellow with stripe, but not before having to redo her terms – a good lesson in perseverance, but totally our fault as we went online and made her memorize the next belt-level’s terms instead of the ones she was supposed to learn and already knew. At Navi’s birthday, she made friends with Isabelle because Navi had so many other friends around – another good lesson which helped for Julie’s wedding we think.
Curie has been buying snacks a lot at martial arts, and has wanted to buy more lunch at school, at times buying two orders of chicken that she loves. We keep trying to get her to eat more, get more calcium and vitamins, but she is growing at her own pace and has been on her own curve at the doctors office. We celebrated Mother’s day with the Hoaglands and the girls gave flowers again through Albert.
Curie is precocious and young for her class, she is a joy and is learning to grow up. She is spirited and imaginative and six going on seven going on sixteen. She is sensitive and wise and brash and funny and everything you would want in a child of her age, like her sister, everything that we want in a daughter. It is no wonder that Elia picks Curie above all others as the one she loves the most. What can you say to that? Curie would give us her signature double mike drop and say “boom.” What a joy to be a parent.