Book Review: Reconstructing Amelia

Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight 

Description from amazon.com:

In Reconstructing Amelia, the stunning debut novel from Kimberly McCreight, Kate's in the middle of the biggest meeting of her career when she gets the telephone call from Grace Hall, her daughter’s exclusive private school in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Amelia has been suspended, effective immediately, and Kate must come get her daughter—now. But Kate’s stress over leaving work quickly turns to panic when she arrives at the school and finds it surrounded by police officers, fire trucks, and an ambulance. By then it’s already too late for Amelia. And for Kate.
An academic overachiever despondent over getting caught cheating has jumped to her death. At least that’s the story Grace Hall tells Kate. And clouded as she is by her guilt and grief, it is the one she forces herself to believe. Until she gets an anonymous text: She didn’t jump.
Reconstructing Amelia is about secret first loves, old friendships, and an all-girls club steeped in tradition. But, most of all, it’s the story of how far a mother will go to vindicate the memory of a daughter whose life she couldn’t save.
Fans of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl will find Reconstructing Amelia just as gripping and surprising.

My review:  LOVED this book.  Could not put it down.  (Confession: last Friday it was raining outside and we had no plans, but the kids had been excited to watch a new 45 minute Jake and the Neverland Pirates special that I had DVR'd earlier in the week....I put that on after dinner, settled in on the couch and finished the book while "watching" with them.  Win-win for everyone!) I enjoyed the style the book was written in (it switched back and forth between the mom and daughter as narrators, and flipped back and forth between past and present).  I agree with the amazon review that if you liked Gone Girl, you'll enjoy this book...I actually liked it even more than Gone Girl. I'd definitely recommend this one!!

Outside aversion and a mommy confession.

 "Mommy, mommy!  It's so warm out, look I'm wearing shorts!  Can we play outside?  Please?  I want to ride my bike and my scooter and crunch the leaves as I drive over them!  Pretty please?"  

We are four days into October.  The Halloween decorations are up, pumpkins are on the front porch, mums are planted, and it's 80 degrees.  One of these things is not like the other, right?  I will be the first to admit, I HATE back and forth weather.  I hate not knowing what to wear from day to day, and I especially hate it if it gets hot again.  But the kids?  The kids LOVE it.  Jake mourns that day that I put his shorts into storage (which was 2 weeks ago....once the temps dipped down into the low 60's, I thought we'd be in the clear)  Not so much.  Had to dig those things back out the past few days. 

So while I have not been loving the sudden fall heat wave, these kids have been soaking up every minute of it.  The snippet of conversation above is what I was bombarded with by Jake after school.  Liam was quick to chime in with a "pweeeeeease?"Meanwhile, a dialogue was already running through my own head:

I was in my work clothes; all I wanted to do was change into pajamas and retreat for the night.

Nothing was ready for dinner.  Nada.  Zip. Zilch.  Not even an idea in my head of what to do.  We had already had the standard fall backs of pasta and tacos earlier in the week.

I had a headache.  The whiny voice inside my head was on a roll, "ugh-can't they just play inside?  Don't they just want to sit down and color a picture or something while I supervise from the couch as the tylenol kicks in?  It's only Thursday, why is this week not over yet? ugh, then I need to figure out dinner on top of everything else.  I'd say we should just go out to dinner, but I'm feeling too lazy to even put the effort in to get everyone back in the car.  Maybe we can just..."

"MOMMY!" 

My thoughts were interrupted by the boys standing there, looking up at me with their shoes in their hands. 

"Can we go?  Please?  Pretty soon it will be dark after school and we'll be sad".

I wanted to point out to him that the collective "we" he used did not include me.  I know, I know...in a few months from now I will be complaining that we are cooped up in the house during the long winter, how we rarely see daylight anymore, and will be counting down the days until spring.   

But here's a mommy confession for you: I am sick of playing outside. There, I said it.

I'm sick of dragging out a gazillion toys when we're out there.  I'm sick of coming home, rushing to get inside only to change clothes, then put everyone's shoes back on and go BACK outside once again. Oh, and don't forget the fun part where we then have to put all of the aforementioned toys away, drag everyone back in the house (usually not willingly, and without the use of threats and/or "I'm going to count to three, and if these toys are not being put away..."), and make sure hands are washed while simultaneously trying to finish cooking dinner.  So there it is.  I'm over it.  Over the outside playing.  I'm looking forward to long weekend days where we have no plans, and sometimes don't even bother to change out of our pajamas all day. 

But alas, last night was not the night to start our winter hibernation.  Even I, the fall-loving freak, thought last night was too great to pass up.  And sometimes, despite my best efforts, these two are just too great to pass up...even if they want to do things that I would normally never, ever do.  Like be outside, fully dressed, running around my driveway at 6:30pm after working all day.  For the record, dinner was pretty much nonexistent.   We scrounged together some leftovers and random side dishes, while I ate a bowl of cereal.  No one ever said balancing it all was easy. 

But it was one night, and we all survived.  And there will be other nights (and there have been already), where the voice inside my head DOES win the battle and I do say no, we're playing inside tonight.  And I think that's ok.  We're still trying to figure out this whole balance thing as we go along.

That is special.

Jake comes home with a lot of projects and worksheets from kindergarten, and while I love looking at all of them, the one that came home last night was a real gem.  In case you can't see it clearly in the picture, the instructions say to draw a picture of something special you can do.  The teacher then wrote out the words below, and Jake traced them. (I want to clarify that here, I posted this pic on facebook last night without that disclaimer about the tracing and people thought he had better handwriting than most adults)

Yep.  Sports Center, baby. Da-na-na, da-na-na!!

Happy October!!

Wordless Wednesday: baking with mommy

The Road to Kindergarten: Part 3

Catching up on our road to kindergarten?  Read part one and part two!

So, we're about a month into kindergarten and some of it's been easy and some parts of have been oh so very hard.  Like, harder than I imagined they would be. 

The easy parts: no more tears when he goes to leave the house like he had on the first day, woohoo!  Homework so far has not been a fight; in fact, he seems excited to do it every night, and proud of himself when he finishes it all by himself.  (Liam joins in the fun every night by getting a notebook and crayon and "doing his homework" at the table beside Jake)  He seems to have had a pretty easy time making friends, and he often talks about playing games with friends and talking to them at lunch.  He's branched out to buying lunches from the cafeteria a few times, which makes me insanely happy.  5+ years of packing lunches every.single.day is right up at the top of my list of "biggest first-world problems that affect me".

Now...the hard parts.  Let's see, where to start....the attitude, the poor choices in the evening when it comes to behavior, etc...etc....you get the picture. I should back-track a bit here and say that it's not all bad....and not every night is like this.  But when it is?  Oh boy, watch out!  Sometimes the "off" days seem to start as soon as I pick him up from school, other days we'll go all evening and have a great time, then all of a sudden, POOF!  A switch goes off and it's like a Jekyll/Hyde situation out of nowhere.

It's been trying, for sure.  And we are doing our best to be patient, while rocking back and forth in the fetal position repeating the phrase, "this too shall pass, this too shall pass".  When we're not doing that, we're talking about what's happening and trying to come up with a game plan.  Positive reinforcement for good behavior, appropriate consequences for negative behavior...but who knows if we're doing it right?  Where is that foolproof manual when you need it??

 
I hate to end on a negative note, so I'll throw this out there: when he first started school, there was another kid who was hitting everyone.  He was acting out in class, and just being generally disruptive.  We were assured that the situation was being handled, and sure enough, Jake eventually said that this kid had stopped hitting in class.  Just this past weekend, I asked Jake to name some of his new friends at school, and one of the names was that kid.  I let him finish talking, then said "I'm so glad to hear that (insert kid name here) is your friend now, do you like to play with him?" and his response was, "Yeah, mommy.  I talked to him one day when he was by himself...I think he had such a hard time at the beginning because he just needed a friend.  I'm his friend now"

So, for as much as I feel like I'm screwing it up a lot of the time, moments like that assure me that I'm doing something right.

Seven years: some things never change.

Happy Anniversary, Brian!! Today is our 7 year anniversary, and looking back through our wedding pictures makes me realize that some things never change.

You can still make me ugly cry:

We still think Heinz Chapel is the prettiest place to get married, no competition:

We still give our marriage 2 thumbs-up:

We still like to be goofy together:

We still like to have our cake and eat it, too:

We still get sad when fun things come to an end:

We are still walking through life together.  Always.

Hitting the running wall

So...running.  Yeah, summer was not my friend.  I hate being hot, I hate sweating, so there was essentially nothing about running in the warmer weather that was appealing to me.  My mother-in-law was kind enough to give me her old treadmill that she no longer used, but I did not enjoy it as much as I thought I would.  I had visions of watching some episodes of the Real Housewives, while gleefully running in my nicely air conditioned basement and simultaneously shouting at the TV about Theresa's latest antics in NJ.  The reality was that the treadmill hurt my body, the air conditioning wasn't even that refreshing when there's no air blowing against you while running, and it was distracting trying to watch TV and not fall backwards off the treadmill, all at the same time. 

Aside from that, I was also growing frustrated with the fact that running was not helping the entire reason I started doing it in the first place (which is because I have high blood pressure); what happened instead was that my blood pressure has started to increase since running.  What a ripoff! I felt betrayed by the medical community! Liars.

I will take any chance I get to use lines from Austin Powers in every day life.

I know, I know.  There is obviously not a direct correlation there...I know that my blood pressure did not go up because I started running.  But it is such a slap in the face to see absolutely no improvement (at this point, I'd even take it just staying the same over going up!)  So that got me down, it really did.  I won't insert a self-pity party here, but it definitely played into my lack of motivation to get out there in the month of August.  

So, as you saw in my last post, I muddled through that 5K.  It wasn't pretty, but I did it.  Now the problem is, that I haven't done it since then. Zip. Zilch.  Nada.  Not a single step of running have I done.  Between feeling defeated by my blood pressure, Jake starting school, and having some busy weekends, it just hasn't happened.  But, it stops here.  I'm back in the saddle as of this week.  I went out last night and did 2 miles without stopping, which was better than I had anticipated considering it's been 2.5 weeks of sedentary behavior.  I hope to get out at least one other time this week, hopefully 3, since the weather is supposed to continue to be cool. 

Steelers 5K and Kids' Kickoff Event

Working a bit backwards catching up on posts here, but a few weeks ago I ran a 5K with my friend, Brett (the father of Jake's on-again, off-again girlfriend Maddie from preschool) and immediately following the 5K, the kids participated in a 40 yard dash on Heinz Field. 

Leading up to this race, I had been struggling a bit with running and my interest/motivation in continuing to do so.  But that's a separate post for another time. Back to the race. Despite a few kid illnesses, I've been pretty healthy for the past few months then, of course, OF COURSE, I managed to get some type of wicked head cold/sinus infection that week.  What started out as annoying mid-week escalated to full-blown miserable by Friday night.  I even contacted someone from the race to see if Brian could run in my place the next morning if I couldn't make it.  He could have done that, but of course, that morning, I was stubborn and convinced myself that once I got there and got going, I would feel much better.

My smile here is totally for the sake of the kids.

Yeah, that never really happened.  It didn't help that it was about 72 degrees at 9am and 95% humidity.  It is astounding the difference that the humidity can make, I felt like I couldn't breathe between being stuffy from the cold and having a cough and the humidity weighing down my lungs.

But---we finished!!  In just over 35 minutes, and that's with stopping to walk briefly 3 times (2 walk breaks on hills, one because I was having a coughing fit and had to stop for a minute to work that out) 

Brian was manning both of our kids and Maddie, here are some pics of them being cute in and around the stadium while Brett and I ran:

 I was in a bad mood by the time we finished if we're being honest; I was mad at myself for being so stubborn and insisting on running and mad at myself that I had to stop and walk those few times.  Then I found a tray of cookies being passed out and felt a bit better.  Then, it was time for the kids event and any amount of foul mood I had was gone in an instant.  The whole day was worth it to see those kids on the field, it was absurdly adorable. 

unfortunately blurry, but that's Jake slightly to the right in the jersey

Then, just when I thought we had already achieved maximum levels of cuteness, I was alerted to the fact that Liam had become an overnight celebrity: his pictures were featured on the steelers site!! You can actually see them here, pictures 23 and 24 and here they are as well:

Belated birthday celebrations at the ball game!

For their birthdays this year, I got Brian & my dad tickets to a Pirates game this past weekend (and Jake got to tag along, too!).  Thanks to my awesome neighbor, they received a MAJOR ticket upgrade into a luxury box!  Livin' large at PNC Park!  The seats were amazing and they had a great time, I'll let the pictures do the talking:

Jake & Pappy, walking the bridge to the stadium

awesome, right??

love that smile.

And then, to make things even a bit better, the pirate parrot came to their section and this happened:

The game continued, and more fun was had....

some footage of Jake cheering on the pirates and practicing his own baseball skills in the suite (while watching the big screen---how will this kid ever go back to regular seats??)




And last, but not least, the game ended with the kids getting to run the bases (running starts around the 40-second mark of the video):

Sweet moves, man.

Master Moves Mickey provides a lot of entertainment in our house!

Disney Countdowns for the kiddos

 As you know, I've been enjoying planning all things related to our trip to Disney World.  I've found a few cute countdown ideas to start doing with the kids, and figured I'd share on here.  All countdowns found on (where else?) pinterest.

This free printable ,courtesy of the Designs by Nicolina blog:

Individual countdown cards found here.

Another calendar idea from the Capturing the Magic blog:

And this adorable (but let's be honest, probably more work than I'm willing to do) countdown paper chain from the Grey Luster Girl blog:

Does your family do any fun countdowns to get excited about holidays or vacations? Share them in the comments!