Homeland

This post isn't about the Showtime show Homeland, although I will say that Mike and I just finished season one and I loved it.  LOVED IT!  That's my review.

But what I mean by Homeland is that we went to NJ last week, Maria and Veronica and my mom and me.  We had a good time, but it was hard.  It's hard to travel 700 miles each way with a four and a three year old.  I think the girls were good, really good, but that's still pretty bad, ha!  I took Maria and Veronica to the beach for the first time, it was a beautiful day, we went with my friend Chrissy and two of her four kids, it was great.  Maria is a fearless girl, I'll say that.  She ran RIGHT into that water, and it was the ocean!  Can you imagine being that brave?  I'm not.  I was scared to death, but she did really well.

We went to Cracker Barrel three times on the trip.  Maria really liked the restaurant but she really REALLY liked the store!  We bought her a lot of crap there, I'm sure that's why she liked it, ha!  Here she is at her first Cracker Barrel, she kills me.

We stopped at my cousin Lisa's on the way out there, she lives in PA and we talk a lot via email but don't get to spend much time together.  We were both pregnant with our second kids at the same time.  We went to my cousin Kim's, where Maria petted her rabbit that they have in a pen in the yard.  We went to my cousin Brian's house, where his daughter Kate let Maria play with all her stuff, it was really fun.  My cousin's kids were incredibly nice to Maria and Veronica - my cousins were too, and my mom's cousins whom we saw, but I was especially impressed by teenagers who seemed so nice and like all they wanted to do was play with these little kids.  I grew up surrounded by first cousins who were around my age and Maria and Veronica don't have that, so it really meant a lot that those kids were so nice.

Oh!  I almost forgot that we stopped and got ice cream on the way home from the shore.  There are all these little roadside shops and we stopped at one, my mom treated them to soft ice cream with sprinkles and it was really great.  I'm sure I'm going to forget all the hard times about the trip and just remember the good times and I suppose that's how it should be.  Isn't she so cute?  That's what I'll remember.

School

Maria has started school and guess what?  She loves it.  Ha!  Is anyone surprised?  Today she started bugging me about when we were leaving (8:45) at 7:30.  That is a long hour and fifteen minutes, trust me, when she is asking literally every two minutes.  She never even says Hi when I pick her up, she just starts yelling at me about what she wants to do.  She wants to go play outside, she wants to go to Dairy Queen, she wants to go to Paige's house, ay yi yi!  But I'm mostly just glad she is having fun and doing well.  I am not one bit worried about her going to Kindergarten next year, and that's a big relief.  

She is learning how to write more this year, they use a program called Handwriting Without Tears and I really like it.  She is so funny, SO funny.  One thing they do in her class this year is that you are supposed to walk in with the kid and help her answer the question of the day.  After Maria finds her name tag, she puts it on the board under YES or NO.  So today the question was about a book they're reading calling Daddy Goes Fishing or something and the question was "does Daddy catch a fish"?  So I asked Maria "in the book you're reading (I pointed at it), does Daddy catch a fish?".  NO!, she yelled at me, ha, and slapped that tag right up in the NO column.  Ha!  She's all mad at the Dad in the book for coming back empty handed.  

She's doing just fine, cute as ever, I wish she wasn't so bossy, same old same old same old.