Day 24 of Lent

Maria marched in the St. Patrick's Day parade yesterday, Mike went to Party City and got her beads and a cute headband with shamrocks on it.  She had a great time, I am hoping that at some point I can find some pictures of it and I'll put them up.

She also finished Monarch Madness last night, which caused them to be up late, it was well after 9:00 when they went to sleep last night so she was super tired and grumpy this morning.  But she can be cajoled into feeling better, and once it occurs to her that she is going to get to go to school and see everyone, she's better.  Lately, I don't know, she just is getting super charming and sweet so even when she is grumpy I know it's not going to last and I can just wait for her to turn back into her great self.

Day 19 of Lent

Maria was in the library when I got there today to volunteer.  She was with her friend Camille, and I was thinking about when school started this year.  Maria was with some kids from her kindergarten class, her friend Luke, and her friend Violet were both in her class the year before.  She told me there was a new girl and her name was Camille.  I said oh how nice, where did she go to school last year?  Maria said, like I was stupid, I don't know!  I didn't talk to her because I don't know her!  I said, Maria, because she is new is exactly WHY you should talk to her and be nice, maybe she's lonely and could use a friend.  That girl marched herself into that school the next day and started talking to Camille and hasn't stopped since, they are total BFF's, according to Maria.

I like her friendship with Camille because I think it shows that a) she listened to me about something and b) that she is a kind person, she has a good heart.  I'm so proud of her, every day.

Day 15 of Lent

Have I said how good Maria is at Math?  She is good at everything, school wise, so far, but she seems to have a great grasp of Math.  She is doing some kind of ca-razy math at school and it's driving Mike and me crazy but we have learned that we don't even really have to get involved.  It's so dumb, she is subtracting and adding by tens and she uses a CHART to figure out, like, 72-10.  If I were doing that, I'd put the 72 on to and a 10 beneath it and then I'd subtract 1 from 7 and 0 from 2 and get 62 but she has to check it on some chart to get to 62.  I don't really want to argue with anyone and as I told Mike, if she can learn it at seven years old, we can surely learn enough to help her with her homework.

Every day that she gets older gets better.  I am sick of so many things but I feel like I will never be sick of helping her with her homework, with listening to her read.  I consider it a miracle.

Day 11 of Lent

Tonight I am taking Maria and Veronica to school, they are doing a Monarch Madness thing.  Their school mascot is the Monarchs, and March Madness! is a thing for college basketball, so this is their school's take on it.  They had the choice of doing basketball, that is, being coached in basketball by older kids, or doing cheerleading and they both chose cheerleading.  I don't blame them, Marta's daughter Maddie is a cheerleader and she wears a super cute uniform and a giant bow in her hair and cheerleading at this level is pretty easy and they can succeed, so why not, right?  

Anyway, of course Maria wants to do it.  She will do anything!  I said do you want to audition for the musical and she said YES.  She told me a few weeks ago, Miss Scheidler said to raise our hand if we wanted to do something in the Mass that we are in charge of, so I raised my hand and now I'm TALKING!  After they rehearsed in the church, she said "we practiced our prayers today that we're doing with the Mass, we used the microphone, it was AWESOME!, I felt like Father Guy or something up there".  Ha!  I said do you want to do Monarch Madness and before I could get the words out of my mouth, she said YES!  Then Veronica said yes too and I think that's lucky.  Maybe Veronica wouldn't want to do things if it were just her but because Maria is there, just one grade ahead of her, she is happy to do it, too.