Kady's Year in Review - TO ME in 2012!!

Here is what I wrote for last year's resolutions, let's review!

My Frivolous Goals/Resolutions for 2011 are:

• Read a ridiculous amount of books (more than 31)! Goal: 50
• Do some writing...I'm always chastising myself for making excuses...not this year?!??
• I have a little art hobby I'd like to start up (time o time, where for art thou, time?!)
• Play indoor soccer
• FINALLY start AND finish a recipe book that's been in the works, well in my head, and all over different torn out pages for perhaps years now?

Let me start by telling you what I did NOT do.  I did not do any writing, or play indoor soccer, or get that recipe book finished.  I did get my torn out recipes into a binder though not quite the "book" I had envisioned.  I take back my goal of playing indoor soccer.  It's never going to happen.  Games start at 9pm and later.  I DO have a plan to write a novel in a month, more on that later!!

As predicted, we took the year off from any house renovations and phew! what a welcome change that was.  Next stop kitchen remodel but not until at least 2013!!!  We did get to take our October vacation for our 10th anniversary which I won't go into because it's well-documented on this blog already!  We have little weekends planned for 2012 and a week to FL for April vacation with the kids.

NOW for the lofty goals I DID accomplish this year.  I'm proud to say that I upped my gym workouts!!  In 2010 I went to the gym on average 3.5 days/week and this year I made a solid 4 days/week.  Not bad considering I took a couple weeks off for vacation and when Seth had his tonsils out!

I also finally finished an art project that I'd been working on forever.  It was a collage for Cal, as seen in the pic below, and I loved doing it.  I've been waiting to have more free time to pursue a collage-frenzy endeavor.  Looks like it might have to wait...tell you why soon!!

This year we got our arts fix!  We made it to a bunch of plays and decided to subscribe this year and got out to a few concerts - Rhianna, Diddy, and Big Time Rush (opener Hot Chelle Rae) with the kids!  More amazingly though I surpassed my goal of reading 50 books this year and read 52!!  Yup, that's right, an average of 1 per week!  I can totally thank those gym workouts because I read while on the elliptical machine.  We watched a whopping 71 movies this year as well.  Since I plowed through that many books and movies I thought I'd give you my top picks (Keep in mind these are only out of the ones I read this year.  It's quite possible there were better books or movies that I didn't get to).

KADY'S TOP 10 MOVIES

1. The Fighter
2. Black Swan
3. Inception
4. Waste Land
5. Win Win
6. The Ring
7. It's Complicated
8. Dinner for Schmucks
9. Love and Other Drugs
10. 127 Hours

WORTH MENTIONING

1. Marwencol
2. Paranormal Activity
3. Conviction
4. The King's Speech
5. The Tillman Story

I will write a disclaimer that after reviewing all the movies I watched this year...a ton of them sucked.  I struggled with the Top 10 even.


And now my best/worst of books....


KADY'S TOP 6 BOOKS

1. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
2. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
3. The Red Garden by Alice Hoffman
4. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
5. The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom
6. The Informationist by Taylor Stevens

DECENT RUNNER'S UP

1. The Writing on My Forehead: A Novel by Nafisa Haji
2. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
3. The Call:  A Novel by Yannick Murphy
4. The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
5. Minding Frankie by Maeve Binchy
6. Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen

MOST THOUGHT PROVOKING

1. The Shack by William P. Young
2. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
3. House Rules by Jodi Picoult
4. Stiff:  The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

BEST NONFICTION/MEMOIR

1. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua
2. Blood, Bones, and Butter:  The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton
3. Lit:  A Memoir by Mary Karr
4. Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield
5. Bossypants by Tina Fey

BEST SERIES

1. Sookie Stackhouse (#1-11) by Charlaine Harris
2. Hunger Games (#1-3) by Suzanne Collins
3. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (#1-3) by Stieg Larsson

WORST BOOKS OF 2011

1. Little Bee by Chris Cleave
2. Swamplandia by Karen Russell
3. Girl by the Road at Night by David Rabe

Ok, well, with that out of the way...I hope at least someone gets to read a good book by reading this!!  I definitely had a better year with books than movies.  It sort of renews my faith in reading and knowing there are a lot of good ones out there, too many to read!!  I track all my books at GoodReads and you can find me on there if you ever need a book recommendation.  I rate them all after I read them and I tend to be a tough critic! 


Now on to my new endeavor for 2012!!!  Let me give you some background first.  I'm reading a little book right now called "No Plot, No Problem!" by Chris Baty.  He is the founder of the NanoWriMo in November.  What is this, you ask?  Well, it's where people all over the WORLD try to write a novel, as defined by 50,000 words, in one month!  The goal is to get quantity and not quality and his idea is that writers get stuck and tripped up trying to write perfectly the first time around.  Also, his big thing is that everyone needs a DEADLINE.  I hear that!!  Amen, hallelujah!!  SOOOO, I have decided to do my own Nano in February (February 1 - March 2nd).  You are allowed to do it in a 30 or 31 day month.  Since February is a leap year this year there are 29 days and I'm giving myself until March 2nd because 1) This is my first time damn it, I'm going to need that 31st day and 2) The kids start vacation on the 27th and that may seriously cut into my writing time!


So what does this mean?  This means that I have finally decided to DO SOMETHING!  Woo hoo.  The thought is both terrifying and exhilarating.  I'm determined not to be a "one day" writer as Chris Baty says in his book....as in "One day I want to write a book".  I can't tell you how many times I've said that!!!  He encourages people attempting to write a novel in a month to tell everyone they know.  Ahh...that's daunting.  What if I don't do it?!  Then I'd have to tell people, they're going to want to KNOW!  I guess that's the point.  The fear of not doing well, of NOT finishing will propel me to keep going when the going gets tough (as I've heard it does get!).  If you are wondering, I have discussed this with Eric and he has given me his full blessing to try it out and agreed to give me extra time away from the kids if I need it! 


I plan to spend the rest of January preparing for my month-long writing craze!  I'm going to make and freeze lots of dinners and do anything I can to get ahead around the house.  I have a proposed "writing plan" of WHEN I'll be writing to try to make that enormous 50,000 word count.  I get a week to plan and research my novel (Baty says it's a bad idea to do more than that because then you just get bogged down when it's time to write and that's the last thing you want!) so I'm going to wait to do that until the last week of January but in the meantime I got a book by my favorite author Elizabeth Berg.  What I like best about her is that her novels are simple, slice of life type stuff.  She usually uses a lot of dialogue (something I think I'm good at) and has minimal characters (which I probably need the first go around).  So I am going to read her book and try to get a sense of the style I want.


I know what you're thinking - you want to know what I get at the end?  Right?!  A rough draft of a NOVEL, of course!!  What could be better than that?  Also, I get to do something I've wanted to do for a long time and never forced myself to start and at the end I'll know if it's something I love to do or not.  Maybe I'll make some surprising discoveries about myself, maybe not, but either way I'll know.  Plus I'm thinking this one-month frenzy would be good to do anything!  It's almost genius.  Maybe this will be the year that I have a one-month cooking craze, a one-month flurry of collage making, a one-month obsession with exercise, the list is endless!


I'm going to keep my goals few this year but higher-reaching than ever!


Goals for 2012 are:

1. Write a novel - Goal:  50,000 or more!
2. Make a portfolio of collages - Goal: 10
3. Keep working out - Goal:  4.5 days/week
4. Read - Goal:  30 books (Paring back this year, it was hard work to read 52!!)

Best wishes for everyone in the new year in whatever you may do!!!

Happy New Year! Happy Birthday! Happy, Happy

 Our version of Christmas morning equals getting in front of the fireplace after I've wrapped all the gifts and taking a picture :)  Best presents this year were the Nintendo DS, wallets, and makeup kits.  If you think I'm kidding, see picture below.

 Aaahhh...the joys of being a little boy and wearing makeup.  The joys of being a mother and using this picture as blackmail later in life.  Love it!  They are being "chipmunks" here as in Alvin and the Chipmunks, notice the brown noses...not sure why Seth doesn't have a brown nose.

 The boys are being Big Time Rush's Kendall (Ben) and Carlos (Cal)...all we need is a bandanna and sunglasses and Seth can be James.

 Finally, after searching everywhere for Spongebob figurines, I found them at Petco - intended for fish aquariums!!

 Cal had his 7th birthday party at Raider Laser, a laser tag place that just opened up near us.  A good time was had by most!  A little crazy with 13 kids running around...

YEAR IN REVIEW FOR THE BOYS:

We renewed the tradition of Eric taking the boys out to breakfast on New Year's Day.  Luckily this year they didn't eat so much and Cal did NOT projectile vomit.  Cal got wind at school or somewhere of "the ball drop" and is vying for a late night next new year's eve.  We'll see.

Normally I write a little ditty about each kiddo at the end of the year.  This year I'm not feeling like THAT much has changed for anyone.  I can say that the biggest change I've noticed for all the boys this year is a definite personality emerging for each one.  This has had it's ups and downs.  Cal is starting to show STRONG signs of being a psychotic type A, most noticeably in sports.  He's the only child that will pass a basketball and then look into the stands for mom or dad (or both) with a look like, "Did I do ok?" meanwhile missing what he's supposed to be doing in the game!  He's taken to badly sabotaging sporting games when he thinks he doesn't measure up...you think he's good at skipping forward??  How about backwards at an indoor soccer game?  Yup, he can do it!  We've found this self-esteem issue frustrating and sad this past year  especially since skill-wise he isn't bad at all!!!  He can compete with the other kids but he's such a headcase that he let's one mistake ruin it all.  You can visibly see him crumbling on the field or court.  No amount of encouragement or talking about it seems to help.  He does favor basketball over soccer so we're hoping he can keep at it and have at least one team sport.  He does love tennis too (although we forbid individual sports only).  Anyway, I fear for Cal's stress levels as he gets older.

Ben, who I thought was going to be my soccer player, is showing a crazy amount of stress and fear to even try it.  This tends to go along with his personality as well.  Any time we bring up the prospect of something new, he's terrified (we've been through it with riding a bike, swimming, skiing, and now soccer which he previously liked!!!)  I'd love to chalk it up to "he's only 5" but I'm thinking this is a personality trait that's here to stay.  Luckily though, usually after forcing Ben to try something he eventually gets over his fear and loves it - ie swimming and skiing.  He had his first time out on the mountain today and did wonderfully! (see photos below)

Seth has no fear of anything yet!  He finally made the transition to using the potty and got his arse back to preschool where he's thriving.  He's funny and silly and mostly adorable except when he's not :)  Getting his tonsils out ended up being a good thing.  I lost a lot of sleep over this BEFORE the procedure but we're all enjoying better sleep now!  Seth continues to be "little" but is doing great in every other way so we're leaving that alone for the moment.  Might I also add, that last year at this time I wrote about Seth singing the song "Dynamite".  I will have you know that that child continued to love that song well into June, asked me to play it over and over, and knows ALL the words now.  He still gets excited if it happens to come on the radio.  He's getting pretty good at knowing words to songs for a 3-year-old!!

All the boys are crazy into singing and dancing.  See my other post where you can click a link to a Youtube video of Seth singing.  It's really cute!  I think we might have the next Hanson or Jonas brothers on our hands.  Cal and Ben (especially Ben) love their piano classes and enjoy making music any way they can.  They "perform" for all babysitters which consists of them running, jumping, dancing around the room and belting out their repertoire of songs.  They got a disco ball for Hanukkah so now they can do these performances in a new, hip disco setting!!  In a couple weeks, they'll both start a singing class too which I'm sort of excited about.  The teacher is a guy who specifically works with young kids and has started his own program at a public school he works for.

To Health, Happiness, and Fun in the New Year!!!

Seth singing "Someone Like You" by Adele

http://youtu.be/9CKbroHG8wE

Not sure if this link works...guess we'll find out.  Just a little clip of Seth being cute.  I couldn't get it to upload from my computer for some reason so I put it on You Tube with limited viewing availability.

Pip

Just wanted to post a little update on Pip so that you know she's alive and doing well.

 Pip in her Halloween costume.  Forgot to put that in the other blog.

 Mostly she just has to put up with these 2 goobers.  They like to chase her and roll around with her.

You'll notice there's no pictures of Cal with the dog.  He doesn't like her, could care less about her, and would have liked it if we could have kept Jules, Grammy's cat.

Happy Birthday Ben!

Somewhere in November there Ben turned 5.  We had half his preschool class at Chuck E Cheese to celebrate with him and a good time was had by all.  Here are a few pictures of the goober enjoying the day.

 Inside the ticket blaster...SO hysterical.  It whips tickets around for 30 seconds while you try to grab as many as you can.  He got a pink ticket worth 200 tickets.  Woo hoo!

 The homeys.

The cake.  Not sure why he wanted Bugs Bunny this year.  I was going to try to put the red Looney Tune logo around Bugs' head.  As you can see that didn't work out, so I wrote Happy Birthday Ben instead.

Happy Halloween!

 The beginning of October - shorts and t-shirts!

 Alvin and the Chipmunks for Halloween

The end of October - snow!

You may realize that I'm writing my Halloween blog post in January.  Yes, I understand I'm a little late but I have a reason!  Shortly after our trip to New Mexico my mornings of freedom as I like to refer to them abruptly ended.  I had a couple weeks in September where I was getting ready for the trip and all my children were happily at school...and I had ONE, just ONE lovely morning when I came back before the devastating news that Seth could no longer go to preschool.  Yup, that's right, KICKED OUT!  "He's not at all interested in potty training and I can't keep changing his diaper," was what the teacher said.  Ugh!  I know, terrible, naive me thought maybe she'd just continue to wipe the smelly poop and I'd keep my freedom.  Not the case, not the case.  Any mom who has a couple, 3, 4 kids knows that when you are expecting "me time" and you get shat upon (literally in my case) that it's a pretty big blow when something comes up and you don't get that night out or whatever it may be.  In my case I got a whiny, clingy 3-year-old to take care of 24/7 again.  Yay me!

In a panic, the next week, I found a place for Seth to go 2 days a week.  It should have been apparent after the first day when an aide, whom I know, told me that Seth had a total breakdown after they tried to change his diaper with gloves on.  This was not too long after he'd just had his surgery for his tonsils and he was still having angst over anything remotely related to a doctor, nurse, medical supplies.  We had to reschedule a dentist visit when he had a complete meltdown after seeing the girl in scrubs call his name.  It's sad, I know.  Either way, he endured 6 weeks of "the new school" where he cried when I dropped him off and when I picked him up.  I endured terrible behavior and INCREASED fussiness.  His mantra became, "But Owen does" whenever he screamed and became non-verbal.  And all that potty training help they said they'd give.  Nada after it was a challenge to merely change a diaper.  We left after Thanksgiving and decided that mommy had to give her full attention to this potty training thing in December and get Seth back to preschool with Ben pronto!  We buckled down and got her done!  It finally clicked and Seth is now an underwear-clad kiddo, happy to be attending Little Clippers with the lovely Miss Carla again.  Mommy is super psyched to have mornings of freedom back for the new year!!!  HELLS YEAH!