The Mean Boy at Toddler Time

I took Bean to our local library’s toddler time for the first time about two and a half weeks ago.  They hold it at 9:30am, so we didn’t get there until 9:45 since he only woke up at 9:15.  But I was determined to get him there that morning since I actually got up and showered before him for a change!  And he LOVES being around other kids and getting out and about, so I’m really trying to find more activities we can do, especially that are free or at least cheap.

We missed the first story, but got there just in time for a song, which the leader handed out “shaker eggs” for (maracas without handles), and Bean, of course, thought that was the greatest thing ever!  The leader was collecting the eggs, and Bean was being so good by going to put his away...until another boy grabbed it out of his hands and put it away himself.  At this point, I’m not sure if that’s the same “mean boy” that this post is really about, but, gee thanks kid.  My son was learning a lesson in helping and actually giving up something in his possession (something we struggle with now that we’ve hit toddlerhood).  She then read another story, which we struggled with…he didn’t want to sit still for the entire thing, but I couldn’t let him run around either.  After all the stories and a song, it’s craft time!  Sometimes he likes to at least color, other times he’d rather just get to playing with the toys they have there.  And enter the “mean boy”…

There’s an older boy, actually I think beyond the age group for this particular toddler time, who was there that day.  I could not believe some of his behavior.  He was there with his younger sister and grandmother, and the grandmother did nothing to try to correct his unacceptable behavior (in my opinion).  I’d say the boy doesn’t know how to share, even though he has a sibling, but he does apparently.  However, he seems to have “selective” sharing abilities.  He and another boy were playing with a HUGE bag of Mega Blocks.  Bean loves his legos!  So of course he sees the bag of legos and goes to retrieve one.  He did not take it out of one of the boys hands.  He did not even take it from the structure they were building.  He took one from the pile not currently being touched or used.  I saw nothing wrong with that.  I was even hoping the boys would let him join in their fun.  But no…  As soon as that kid saw Bean holding the lego, he grabbed it and ripped it out of Bean’s hands so hard that I was afraid he would hurt him!  Bean did not seem too phased by that (thankfully), but I wanted to cry for him!  It broke my heart to see someone be so mean to him…   I slowly led Bean away and said “I’m sorry baby, you’re apparently not allowed to play with them”, hoping the grandmother would hear me and reprimand that boy or at least tell him he needs to share with all the kids, since those blocks were not his own personal ones.  But no.  I tried to keep Bean away from the blocks as much as possible, but when the grandmother began to put them away and BEAN (not her grandson!) actually helped her, I thought he would finally get his chance at those blocks and that they would be out of there a lot quicker than they were.  But no.  The boys continued playing, the grandmother continued ignoring them, and the legos were still there.  So, when I saw Bean go to retrieve a car lego that was sitting away from the boys, unattended, unused, I let him take it (because my boy LOVES his cars – first word by the way!).  The mean boy went to take it from Bean, but I stepped in (since Grandma couldn’t be bothered to).  He reached for it and said they needed ALL the legos because they were building something huge (which they hadn’t gotten very far with, and Grandma was already trying to get the kids out of there), but since I was now holding it, he did not grab it out of my hands.  It took all I had to remain calm.  But I did.  And I said to the other boy, “But can we please share?”.  He began to protest, claiming they needed every single lego in existence, and again, I just said, “Can we please share?”.  At that point the mean boy backed down and then was out of the library a few minutes later (HUGE structure not even halfway completed, I might add).  But really?  I don’t feel I should be the one who has to teach other people’s children a lesson in sharing.  However, I did tried to that day.  At first I felt completely helpless for Bean.  I never encountered a situation like that before, and I had absolutely no idea how to approach it.  After seeing that the grandmother was doing nothing about it, I felt it was my turn to step in and stand up for my son.  Yes, I realize that one day I won’t be there to defend him.  I realize that he will have to look out for himself at times.  But at only 20 months old, I needed to do something.  Did I do the right thing?  Should I have done something differently?  It felt like the right thing.  And I really don’t know what I would have done differently. 

We went back to toddler time the next week, and I was kind of dreading “the mean boy”.  What would happen this week?  How would I react?  How would Bean react?  We lucked out.  The mean boy wasn’t there.  We missed toddler time this week, because someone was a sleepy head (thanks daylight savings for screwing up our wake up time…), but I will continue to take him back every week we possibly can go.  Especially because we did meet a very shy, nice little boy, a year older than Bean, who played with him the second week.  And the boy’s mom is nice and easy to talk with as well. 

Have you ever encountered a situation like this?  How did your child react?  How did you react? 

Scrapbook Saturday

I didn’t get to do a Scrapbook Saturday post last week.  Honestly, I don’t even know what happened to my day last weekend.  I think I was just lazy and not on the computer much on Saturday, so I was going to do it Sunday, and then didn’t get the chance to then because we were at my grandmother’s a good portion of the morning/afternoon.  But anyway, here’s my page for this week:

I used a premade template, but I changed the background color and added the light blue elements, along with the text.  I’m still learning how to do things with that program.  These photos are from my long time friend’s wedding.  Her colors were a light blue and a light green, so I tried to incorporate the closest matches.  You have me and her in one photo, the items she had on the tables in the other photo, and me trying to be all artsy with one of the centerpieces in the third photo.  Her dress was beautiful, and it was so nice to see her so happy!  We have been friends since we were very young, since her grandmother is my grandmother’s hairdresser, and we were in the same grade at school.  Even our birthdays are only 3 days apart!  I also got to see another old high school friend there that I haven’t seen pretty much since high school.  It was a nice day.   :)

Giveaway!

Not from me, but it caught your attention, didn’t it?!? But there seriously is a giveaway going on. I waited a little too long to do this post (mainly because I wanted to mention it in earlier posts, and I totally forgot – sorry!), so I’m not sure who will see it in enough time to be able to enter themselves, but if you don’t see it in enough time to enter, you should still check out her blog and her other sites (Avon, photography, Etsy shop)!

Laura, at Army Wife Life is hosting a giveaway featuring two different items. She is a great photographer, so one item up for grabs is a beautiful blossom print, photographed by herself, and she is also an Avon rep, so the other item to choose from is a new perfume pendant with Fergie’s new scent hidden inside. Both items are beautiful! She has a few ways to get entries into the giveaway (this method being one of them!), but the deadline to enter is midnight tonight, so hurry up – but again, if you see this too late, sorry! Still check out her other sites!

Giveaway post is linked here.

Catching Up

Wow, I am finally all caught up on my Google Reader for the blogs I follow!  My vacation at the end of July put me severely behind on my reading, and posting – I have finally gone from 300+ unread posts to 0! 

My weeks have either been really busy or really lazy since returning too.  The busy weeks didn’t allow me much or any time to post, and the lazy weeks were just that – LAZY!  I didn’t feel like doing anything at all, and in most instances, I didn’t.  I’m hoping to finally get back on track with things now.

I started a private dance lesson with a new student the week after coming back from vacation.  If I refer to her by “name”, it will only be “K” since this is a public blog and I do not have her parents permission to use her real name or anything else personal on here.  K lives in a not-so-great area of the city, which makes me nervous, and parking has been a real pain, but I’ve had 3 lessons with her now, and it’s been going great!  She says she has fun, she’s outgoing, and a good listener for the most part.  :)  This month I stuck to summer and Hawaiian music, and we’ve even begun a real hula dance!  It has been fun for me so far, and I look forward to hopefully continuing lessons for a long while.

My cousin also contacted me to ask if he could have a family get together here at our house (which happened on the 15th), since we all live all over the place and he was coming up from Florida that week to visit.  I agreed, as long as our backyard wasn’t under construction for our patio, since I planned to keep everyone outdoors for the entire time, or at least as many people outside for as long as possible.  My patio hasn’t been started yet, and unfortunately it rained – and poured – that day, so everyone was stuck inside.  I had spent the entire week before that cleaning my house from top to bottom.  It was time to do all the cleaning anyway, but I also care about how my house looks to other people, and I knew there would be family wanting to see it all for the first time, so I wanted it looking perfect.  I expected people in and out for the bathroom, a tour of the house, etc., but I didn’t expect to end up with 19 people crammed into 3 rooms, tracking mud, grass, and food all over my floors.  I was very stressed about the whole thing, and the only person from my cousin’s bunch that said a sincere thank you and related to how stressed I was was my other cousin’s wife.  The cousin that asked me to have it here, and his parents, brother and SIL (other cousin and wife mentioned above) showed up 2 hours late and stressed me out even more.  The cousin that asked to have it here decided it would be fun to joke around that he spilled red wine on my white carpet (he really did not, but thought it was hilarious to joke about it).  I also did not provide the wine, as I didn’t really want any alcohol here with the mix of family that came, but one of my aunt’s brought it because my cousin told people to bring whatever they wanted, never got a list of what people were bringing, and didn’t tell me that he told the rest of the family to bring stuff.  Long story shortened, I was kind of mad at that part of the family, happy to see other parts of the family, and have learned my lesson to never offer my house as the gathering location for something like that ever again!

My friend had her second baby last week and I’m excited to meet him and visit with her.  She teaches baton in the group I’m involved in too, but with having the baby and the week before having the baby, she hasn’t been at practice.  I’ve seen pictures, but I’m hoping to get to meet him in person this week and deliver her baby gifts!   :)

We haven’t gotten our patio started yet, but they have now marked the whole property where utilities are located under ground.  We are set to begin work anytime after tomorrow, so now it’s just up to the landscaper to get started – I’m very anxious for that!  I can’t wait to have that done and hopefully enjoy it as much as possible before the fall turns too cold.

So, that’s my catch up for now.  I finally took pictures of my new jewelry set I made before vacation, so I would like to do a post with those, and I definitely have more vacation fun to share.  :)

Tuesday and Wednesday Accomplishments

I have definitely been more motivated this week, in the crafting department anyway. I haven’t finished a whole lot of anything yet, but I’ve at least been working on things a little, which is certainly a lot more than other weeks recently! So, here are some of my accomplishments this week so far:

I booked our vacation to Ocean City, MD last night. We are going to get away and relax for my hubby's 30th birthday! We’ve never been there before, and I’m extremely excited to go. We have been on a couple overnight stays or weekend getaways (2 actually – NYC overnight for our 1 year wedding anniversary, and Baltimore for a weekend in Nov. 2007) since our honeymoon, but no real extended vacation since then. We’re not big ocean swimmers or anything, but it will be nice to just relax on the beach with books, take walks along the ocean, and just have nothing real to worry about for a whole 5 days.

I bought metallic silver spray paint. I had started to decorate a wedding themed photo frame over a year ago. The idea was to paint it silver, then use white ribbons, stencil some white words, and throw in some of the double heart charms I bought for a few projects from my own wedding somewhere on there too. I bought a better frame than my Snowflake Photo Frame, sanded it all down, and began painting it with silver acrylic paint. I can’t even remember how many coats I was up to with the acrylic paint, and it still isn’t smooth or consistent enough for my likings. I thought the spray paint would work better, but I was a little nervous about the silver part – the acrylic looked nice, and I was afraid the spray paint would look tacky. So, this week, I sprayed over the frame with the new paint. I like the silver look, but it’s still not quite smooth enough for me in some areas, so I’m going to have to re-sand and re-paint. I was going to do that today, but I prefer to do it in my garage with the door open, and it was extremely rainy, then extremely humid today, so I didn’t think the paint would dry very well. Hoping to get to that tomorrow.

I made myself a new earring/necklace set! I had some beads I bought a while back that I hadn’t done anything with yet, and I was finally motivated to create something with them today. It’s my favorite set so far! :) I’m calling it “Blue Beach”. It’s made from 2 different sized white shell beads and round light sapphire shell beads. My birthday on Saturday motivated me to create it, because I want to wear it that day and feel pretty. :) The upcoming beachy vacation was also a good kick in the butt too – I like to take all my pretty clothes and jewelry with me on vacation, it makes me feel even better. Here it is:

I found this new way of photographing my jewelry from looking at other people’s online shops and blogs, and I am so much happier with the result of my pictures this time. I even had the perfect dishes for this particular set! (Sandbar from Pfaltzgraf) This specific set is mine for keeping, but as long as the beads are still available, I will definitely be adding it to my Artfire site! So, guess what that means? Craft store, here I come!

I’m hoping to be able to at least finish all the silver painting on the frame tomorrow now, and work on some sachets for a friend who requested I help her make them for Christmas gifts. I haven’t tackled them yet because my very old and decrepit free sewing machine that I got from my parents started to give me trouble last time I used it. I almost broke the needle a couple times because the tension has decided to turn on me and not loosen up, so I may now need to take my grandmother up on her offer of giving me her old sewing machine, which is certainly in better condition than the one sitting here collecting dust now. Hopefully I will at least be able to start on them this week yet – I also have to make some jewelry that my other grandmother requested for a birthday gift for her friend (yet another excuse for a craft store trip!).

It might not seem like much to some of you crafters out there, but the rate I’ve been going lately, these are huge accomplishments for me!

My Married Life

So, I said today would be a very special post – today I am celebrating 3 years of marriage to my soul mate! :) I thought for today’s post I would reflect on how I met my hubby and my wedding day.

I met my hubby online, thanks to my best friend at the time. My family finally got connected to the internet the summer between my junior and senior year in high school, and she was helping me learn my way around the interwebs when she decided I should talk to this guy she talked to from NJ. We began talking online, daily, and really started to like each other just from conversation. We decided to meet in person the summer between my high school graduation and first year in college (talking online almost daily for a year now), so his whole family decided to take their week long vacation here in PA, we met face to face for the first time, and became a long distance couple by the end of the week (July 21st to be exact)! We made a long distance relationship work for 6 1/2 years, when he proposed the day after Christmas in 2005. We moved in together into an apartment in central NJ in August of 2006, and got married on June 16th, 2007. Three years later, we now own a house back in my old hometown area in PA.

Our wedding day was beautiful and went smoothly. I ended up with the first dress I saw in a magazine. It was an Alfred Angelo design, and so were the bridesmaid dresses and my mom’s outfit. The flower girl’s dress, however, was a totally different designer, but yet somehow matched perfectly to my dress! I loved their dresses, which I left the decision making up to them, and gave them their wedding day jewelry as their gifts during the rehearsal dinner.

I picked my colors based on hydrangeas, and the fact that I love the color periwinkle, as well as the blue and purple color combo. My bouquet turned out beautiful, full of white roses, purple lisianthus, and blue delphinium. The girls carried hydrangeas, but the flower girl was not allowed to drop flower petals in the church, so she carried a bouquet similar to mine in her basket.

Isn’t she adorable?!? Do you see the matching of our dresses? I loved it!

The church was kind of warm, since there was no AC and it was a beautifully hot day that day. Thankfully, no one passed out, and even though the ceremony seemed to take forever at the time, it was actually fairly short. We walked out of the church to a flurry of bubbles (rice was not allowed – but I didn’t really need to deal with pulling rice out of my hair and dress all day anyway). After pictures in the church, and my feet were killing me (my shoes were off for most of the church photos), we were whisked away by our slightly lost and confused limo driver to our outdoor photo location. The pictures came out beautiful, but getting into place was a little tricky as we had a lot of goose poop to maneuver around! As soon as I yelled out, “Watch out for the goose poop!”, the kids had fun with that little saying!

This one was tricky…we were precariously perched on those tree roots, with the water only a few inches away behind us!

The infamous “goose poop” walk!

The reception was Disney themed, since we love Disney and went there for our honeymoon (we did 4 days in the park, 3 days on the Disney Bahamian cruise, and one night/day at Universal Studios). The tables were given Disney names instead of numbers, and the name cards/favor cards had a clip art picture on it to match which table the guest was sitting at. The head table was “Magic Kingdom”, and other tables included “Mickey Mouse”, “Little Mermaid”, “Peter Pan”, “Jungle Book”, “Lion King”, “Finding Nemo”, “Pinocchio”, and more. Each table’s centerpiece was a mirror with a set of 3 different sized glass cylinders filled with water and a floating candle, surrounded by small votives. There was also a silver picture frame on each table, and instead of photos in them, I created a scrapbook style piece that used an appropriate piece of scrapbook paper as a background to match the stickers I found for each table theme. I arranged the stickers to almost look like a mini movie poster in each one. Sadly, I don’t have any pictures of any of these, at least not that I have found so far. We walked into the reception to Disney songs. My parents walked in to “Be Our Guest”, since they were paying for and hosting the party, his parents got “Bella Notte” from Lady and the Tramp because they are Italian and it’s the only Italian Disney song there is, the kids walked in to “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo”, my MOH and BM got “Never Had a Friend Like Me”, the other 2 “couples” entered with “You’ve Got a Friend in Me”, and hubby and I chose “You’ll Be In My Heart”. We danced our first dance to Michael Buble’s version of “For Once In My Life”. I choreographed a foxtrot style dance for us! :) My dad and I danced to “In My Daughter’s Eyes” by Martina McBride,

and my hubby and his mom danced to “"My Wish” by Rascal Flatts. We had buffet style food, beer, wine and soda, and a fuzzy navel fountain (my favorite alcoholic drink!). Our cake was a simple chocolate and vanilla cake with buttercream icing, as I knew I could please everyone with that, and came out beautiful! We found that wonderful Precious Moments figure and had to use it as our cake topper, and my dad bought us the Lenox Sleeping Beauty castle found under the tiers (Cinderella’s castle would have been better, but we only found that in Disney World during our honeymooon, as it’s exclusive to there).

(Can you find the hidden Mickey’s?)

Overall, it was a success with a lot of fun had by all, but I regret to say that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to and should have. Due to the heat and stress of the day, I was becoming dehydrated (by the time we went on our honeymoon, I spent the first 2 days drinking as much water as possible, and almost passed out from the heat and dehydration while waiting in line the the Backlot Tour ride in what’s now called Hollywood Studios – it got much better after that!), I felt sick when it came time to eat, so I didn’t eat much at all, and the only alcohol I had all day and night was the champagne in the limo and the champagne toast at the reception – I didn’t even get a sip from my fuzzy navel fountain I wanted sooo badly! I was also so worried about mingling and talking to each table to show our appreciation for them coming, that I didn’t really get to relax and have fun dancing. Especially since a few guests also didn’t really know how to make small talk and keep a conversation short! I did participate in a few dances, but I do look back on the reception part with some regrets and wishes. Maybe someday, in the far future, we can re-create a reception or vowel renewal or something, and I would definitely allow myself to enjoy it more….that’s my wish…who knows if it will ever come true… ;)

(I warned you there would be pictures and a long post! Thank you for reading the whole thing – you’ll get my thank you if you actually got to this part and made it through such a long post - and sharing a review of my special day!)

*Photos courtesy of Photography by McDonough*