Donate a chunk of hair to locks of love - Bucketlist #51

I've been in a hair funk for quite some time. Post TC I pretty much wore a standard-issue mom ponytail for two years, all about function with zero style or styling requirements. I had bangs for a while, which gave me the illusion that I had some sort of actual hair style, but eventually I realized I wasn't really keeping up with those either (my hair grows fast and I wasn't making it out for solo haircuts very often, even if they were fast and cheap, and NO WAY was I doing it myself. I have no skills for haircutting). As TC has grown and I've been able to steal a few moments away I'd started to sort of style my hair for some special occasions - I'd flat iron out the weird ripples that developed during my pregnancy, curl the ends under, it would look okay:

Christmas 2012

But I soon realized that even when my hair started out looking presentable, it would mat and knot under it's own friction and by the end of the day I'd have a huge rat's nest at the base of my neck. It was embarassing, I'm sure it looked awful, and it sucked to try and comb (rip) out. I don't know how people with long hair do it, if they just have thinner hair than I do, or brush it every hour, or use some magic product, but I couldn't take it. I was sick of the ponytail, and couldn't hack keeping it down, so I did some measurements and determined it was time to tackle bucketlist #51 - donate to locks of love.

Donations need to be a minimum of 10", so I divided my hair into 4 ponytails and put binders around 11" up, meaning the first cut was about 12" off.

My  hair is so thick, I think I get credit for 2 or 3 donations for this :) It was like an actual pony's tail when I wrapped it all up.

I didn't take any photos at the salon, I purposefully left my camera at home because the pressures of this mega cut were enough without feeling like I had to be in photos right away. The strange ladies next to me appeared to take several photos though, and couldn't stop asking me about what was going on (shouldn't going to the salon be relaxing? Who does that to other people?!?!) and basically narrating the whole experience (you're  not helping!)

I don't have any great "after" photos yet, but I definitely feel a foot lighter. The new cut makes more sense with the new texture of my hair (I got wavy during pregnancy, so it was really weird to have 4" of waves then straight for 16". Awkward), it's low fuss and dries quickly, or I can curl/iron it up for a different look. It looks WAY lighter in color with all the bulk gone too, neither good nor bad, but interesting.

I doubt I'll ever have hair this long again, so I'm glad I could make it count - the hair will help sick little girls feel better about their appearance with custom fit hairpieces, definitely a worthy cause.

Toys for Other Tots

I've (hopefully) started a couple of holiday traditions for our family: the annual ornament, setting up the tree, and donating a toy each year to charity. The latter is still in it's formative stages - in theory we would all go together as a family and pick something out that was meaningful, but time was against us this year so in the final days before collections ended I grabbed something on my own during a rare solo shopping trip. I still tried to make it meaningful by picking a doll that reminded me of The Cupcake:

 

It was barely in our house for 24 hours before I remembered to grab it on my way to a meeting at a school that was collecting for toys for tots, but it was just enough time for TC to see her. And go completely nuclear when she was not allowed to "had it! had it!"

Guess we have some work to do on the "Christmas Spirit", eh?

The doll made it to the charity, the kid eventually recovered from her blubbery puddle on the floor, and has since started to play with her own dolls (which are more age appropriate and have less hair to destroy).

Cupcakes for The Cupcake - 2nd Birthday

 

The Cupcake turned two in January, and we celebrated with a small gathering at a local ice cream shop. It was a smashing success - though TC wouldn't be tied down in her high chair or pose for any non-blurry photos (2 year olds, sheesh), because she was much too busy mingling.

I chose a very small location (max occupancy 12) and just a few projects to keep the party personal but manageable. Elmo HAD to be the theme, as TC is nuts over him, and I didn't mind the bright fun color scheme the little monster brings. One of the projects I decided to do early on was Elmo cupcakes:

 

They turned out great, and were so easy! Chocolate mini cupcakes were baked from a mix. Red frosting was made from 2 cans of white store brand frosting and a whole bottle of Wilton no-taste red. Yeah, that's a lot, and will probably stain clothes, but I didn't want pink Elmos so I kept adding more and more, and in the end it turned out GREAT (this would totally stain clothes I'm guessing, and will make mouths red - but it's a b-day party, and a toddler - we knew stains would happen).

 

 

Here's the process - I used a mix to make mini cupcakes in foil liners. Then I piped stars as a base (or "fur" for my little monsters), added candy eyes by Wilton that are available at a lot of grocery and Target stores now, an orange jelly bean nose, and a chocolate piped smile. I didn't try to hard to make anything perfect (monsters are messy) and I cranked them out really quickly.

Blog Bug

I have a few posts written, and several I'm waiting to write, but for some reason Blogger won't let me upload any more photos (the horrors!) and I can't figure out why. When I look at my data limits it appears as if I'm well inside the free boundaries, but I'm not technical enough to sort it out after about a week of trying, so forgive this added delay...

We were okay. And that is good.

I just went back through my blog looking for this past year's resolutions and realized that I made none - at least not on this blog - since I took November - March off of posting apparently!

Life happens.

So the good news is, no blown resolutions!

The less good news - no accomplished resolutions. And nothing much checked off the bucketlist.

I gave myself half credit for finishing up  the first half of #12: Learn to take great photos and get a “real” camera - I took a photo workshop in April that was really enlightening if only for showing me the power of a low aperture lens, which did drastically improve my portraits. Unfortunately, since then, my toddler's ability to pose (read: stop moving) for portraits has diminished to almost zilch, so I can't say I've actually produced many "great photos" lately.

 

I may have accomplished #68 Start an Xmas tradition and carry it on forever, but I'm not sure when I actually get to count that as completed?) I'll update on this soon and you can decide.

And that is really about it. Not that I feel unaccomplished this year. I've actually come pretty far. I am starting to feel relaxed more often, which is fairly foreign to me. I am starting to feel okay when people come to my house and it's covered in goldfish crackers or dishes are stacked in the sink - not that I aspire to live in a pit, but I'm working to be less uptight about having company over in general. I'm more comfortable taking The Cupcake out into the world, more confident that we will have fun adventures and less worried about her melting down or making a scene - again, I'm re-setting my tolerance for being imperfect in public. I'm learning to strike out all the other verbs and just "be."

I'm still not sure what I want to do with my life or as a career, and that still scares me. But I'm doing a much better job of living right now, instead of 4 weeks/months/years down the road. Heck, I can't even tell you what I'll be doing next week (or what day it is today, honestly), so I'm learning to live outside of a schedule pretty well.

I think the biggest thing I've learned this year is that the stay at home mom mantra is true: the days are long, but the years are short.

Some days are very, very long. Most of the days of my pregnancy were full of nausea and heartburn. Much of TC's first year was a haze of sleep deprivation. The second was non-stop action and some days I begged for a nap myself (or just some time to sit), but those long days eventually faded into short years - has it been another one already? Will I have a 2-year-old at the end of the week?

Yes. And we will celebrate with a delightful party, one that is small and manageable but also a reason to splurge and try a few crafts and take a lot of photos. A chance to gather the family and our closest friends around an absurdly big bowl of ice cream, dress TC in a special outfit she will probably only wear that once, and listen to her laugh and try to make everyone around her do the same. I will probably stress about it, and run late, and order too much food - but then I will sit down, and relax, and enjoy the evening as I am just now learning to do.

A lot of mommybloggers say that their kids teach them all sorts of lessons, and I suppose mine does too, but what stands out to me more is what I've learned not from my kid, but from being her mom. Being a mom. I've been humbled. I'm continually struck by how difficult it is to parent, mostly in the tiny little decisions or enduring the situations in which we have no decision, let alone the big scary ones we fret over so much. I'm shocked and surprised at my own reaction to things, and how I never could have anticipated the way I'd feel in any of these situations, or how I'd react, or that I'd even face many of them. I'm then shocked and surprised again that I can realize these changes and step back to look at my whole life, and everyone else's around me, differently. 

There have been few tremendous highs this year, and several terrible lows - we lost family members, including our longtime companion Norm. Illness struck our extended family. Cars broke, stuff wore out, money was tight.

But mostly, it was okay.
We were okay.
We had what we needed, we wanted what we had, and there was a wonderful peace in that. 

I think in 2013 I may not resolve to reach as many heights as I sometimes feel I should. I am often guilty of "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good", and that creates a cycle of stress that is self defeating and not fun. So, instead, maybe I'll just live in the middle for a while, and enjoy the peace between extremes. I'll check some things off my bucketlist if it works out, and I'll keep working towards some more organization, surrounding myself with things and people and tasks that make me happy, but I won't push it. I'll just be.

Should I really give Santa Credit for This Anyways?

The Cupcake visited Santa, and can pick him out of a photo (though sometimes she calls him PaPa), and if you ask her what he says, she will give a hearty "Ho ho ho!" But TC doesn't know what Santa "does" yet.

 

Thank goodness.

 

Nor does she have any sense of time, or dates, or holidays. Which is very convenient. I decided to put together her big present, purportedly from Santa, on December 23rd, since it was a lazy Sunday afternoon and we had no obligations, and we'd be out late on Christmas Eve for sure. I had no idea what I was in for. I couldn't even lift the box (which could double as a pauper's coffin with no trouble).

 

 

Everything was packed nicely, all 7.5 million pieces in one huge brick...

 

With 400 pages of IKEA-ish sketched directions.

 

I called in reinforcements - power tools are one of man's best advancements. Though I could have used some elves too (maybe Santa knows what he's doing?)

 

The pile of foam wrap, cardboard, and styrofoam was bigger than the original box. The physics are baffling.

 

But somehow, 3 hours + 6 broke nails later, it was done. And adorable. And sturdy (so far). In fact, this thing is WAY nicer than any of our kitchen cabinets. And since our kid has no concept of Santa, or days of the week, or dates on the calendar, we just let her discover it when she got up from her nap instead of trying to hide it for 2 more days (did I mention it weighs as much as a small car?).

 

It was a hit! The Cupcake loves her "chicken." Especially the "seenk!" It has a ton of storage, the oven and dishwasher open like cabinets (instead of opening vertically, at which point the kid steps on the door and breaks it immediately after assembly), and even that "tile backsplash" is heavy wood, not just cardboard. She won't leave the shelves in the oven or dishwasher, but otherwise she has been loving it for hours, talking and cooking and amusing herself just as I had hoped.

Definitely loves filling everything from the sink, I'm so glad we got this sturdy set with a heavy duty faucet! The phone has to be her second favorite, and she even points out the big numbers on the "base" of the phone.

 

 

I'm not sure what we'll do next year when she has a bit more awareness of the world (probably buy pre-assembled gifts?) but there still seemed to be plenty of Christmas magic this season, even if some of it came a few days early.

P.S. This is the KidCraft Urban Espresso kitchen set via Amazon. It was about $180 (I think) and right now I'm super happy with the choice. While it was a bit of a bear to put together (not necessarily hard, I did it myself in about 2-3 hours, and didn't do anything wrong, it was just a lot of steps), it seems really sturdy, everything is smartly designed for real kids (i.e. the oven door thing), there are no noisy buzzers or sound effects or flashing lights (we have enough toys that yell at me), and I can definitely see this lasting for years to come. It's not terribly huge either, we're going to keep it in the living room for now since that is where we spend most of our time. It says 3&up on the box, but there are no small (removable) parts and my almost 2 year old, while pretty tall for her age, is able to interact with everything just fine.

The Ornament Tradition - 2012

One of the holiday traditions we are starting is to pick out an ornament for The Cupcake each year. Something that relates to her life during the year we get it, and once she is all grown up and decorating her own tree we can give her the whole set of memories to begin her own collection of holiday decor (in theory...I'm not necessarily convinced I'll be ready to part with them, but for sure she can have them in the will).

 

Two years ago, when I was pregnant, we started with this one.

 

Last year, her first Christmas, I picked out a monkey in a ballerina costume which looked almost identical to the little monkey on her first birthday invitations, and suited our little dancing (and running, and climbing, and wiggling) monkey just fine:

 

 

This year I was pretty sure we had to find something that represented her FAVORITE guy in the whole world, and no, it's not Daddy or PaPa...

 

It's Elmo.

 

The first thing TC asks for in the morning is Elmo. Sometimes it makes me feel like a massive failure that my almost 2-year old knows a TV character so well, but I swear it was love at first sight - Elmo was one of her earliest words, PaPa P got her a stuffed Elmo doll when she was pretty little, and some days a little Elmo is just the lifesaver we both need to make it through another long day (the years are short, but the days are looooooong). This past week we volunteered at a gift wrap booth for 3 hours a day 4 different days. How, I ask you, does one entertain a toddler in an 8' X 8' space for 3 hours? Elmo makes the impossible possible. Instead of beating myself up over it, I'm going to accept, acknowledge, and heck, even celebrate it. Elmo is a big part of our life right now.

 

This was the best likeness I could find of the officially licensed ornaments. We wanted to be sure the money went to Sesame Workshop, without whom I could never get dressed or pee during the day. I like the idea of getting a glass ornament each year, while she can't play with them, it will feel like more of an heirloom to hand over eventually.

 

Here's hoping you're building family traditions of your own today & all year round...