Cycle of Friends

I had something happen yesterday that I felt the need to chat with someone else about.  The sad thing was, I could only think of one person here that I consider a good enough friend to talk about it with.  And its not even that personal.  It was about a call from the school about a kid's misbehavior.  I don't know how cross I should feel about the school's handling of it, or just let it go.  But I digress.  Rather than focusing on the school issue, I chose to focus on how hard it has been to make friends here.

Those who read this probably already know me.  Being a military brat, I know the importance of putting yourself out there and making the effort to find friends and to be friendly.  Since we live on a base, it should be easy to make friends.  Since we go to church, I should have even MORE options.  So I feel very sad that people here are really not receptive to new friends.

I also realized that I'm in a different part of my life.  When I was single, I had roommates and friends at school.  When I got married, no one wanted to be friends, because everyone we knew was newlyweds and they were all wrapped up in new love and didn't have any interest in making friends.  Then it was new motherhood, and everyone wants to be your friend!  You are in the Mom Club and have lots of opportunities to make friends.

Fine, not all new moms do, but when you look for mom groups and hang out in the mother's room at church, you make friends pretty easy.  Same with when you have small children.  Going to the park, kid activities and stuff like that puts you in touch with other moms and you make friends.  And again, I've always found friends at church.  I have definitely sought out opportunities to meet new people and to make friends, and I've always felt like I made friends pretty quickly whenever we have moved.

Now, I have no baby.  My baby is growing.  I'm no longer in the New Mom Club. I have kids in school, and other moms with kids in school are not hanging around looking for friends.  I have gone to the base Mommy and Me playtime and the moms are pretty reserved there.  They chat with the people they already know and are not interested in new friends.  At church, it kind of feels the same.  I DO have friends, but I wonder why it feel so hard to maintain it.

I don't recall ever having so much trouble maintaing any sort of friendship before.  I've always had different levels going on at the same time.  You know, you have the friend you chat with a lot, and the friend who you call when you have a bad day, and the friend you have play dates with and the friend who calls you when she needs something, and the friend who you swap favors with.  But at least some of them feel easy and natural and don't require a lot of effort.

Here, I feel like I could disappear and no one would notice.  Especially right now, since I have no calling at church!  I could vanish and no one would ever call to see what happened.  And I wonder, is it me?  Have I reached a point where I just don't care to put forth the effort?  Is it this place?  Are people here just so grumpy that they have to live here that they just retreat from any interaction?  Or is it really me?  I don't think I'm that unlikeable.  I think maybe it is just that I don't have as many interactions.  There aren't any regular enough activities that I go to and hang out and chat with others enough to form a strong basis of interest.  Fine, that isn't entirely true.  We DO go to story-time and that's where most of my friends are. And I DO have a few friends, but I guess I wish they were more.  More friends.  More stronger ties.  More emotional support. More I'd feel comfortable asking things from.

I think I'm feeling moody today.  Most of the time I'm quite happy to do my thing.  I have my routine and I like it and I don't need to add any more activities to it.  But occasionally, I think it might be really nice to have someone other than family to call.

Monkey Time!

Let's start with a Delaney follow up.  After 4 weeks in her cast, Delaney finally got it removed.  She could not wait for the exciting event.

However, once it was time, she was terrified.  The silly pickle whimpered through the whole process. 

I told her to hold her arms up so we could see and compare, but this was the best I got.  She was making silly faces the whole time.  The doctor wanted x rays before the cast came off, and again afterwards.  Delaney had a great time making faces for the x-ray tech, who dubbed Delaney "Silly Lilly" for her antics.  Delaney is now out of the cast, but they gave her a soft splint to wear for rough activities.  Delaney refuses to take it off so far.

An on to the fun part!  MWR had a Family Fun Fitness Festival and I ended up taking the girls for the last 45 minutes of it.  It was particularly wonderful in that there were few people by then and the sky was a bit overcast, so it wasn't quite so sweltering.  But the big draw....

The climbing wall!  Marian was so excited!  And then learned that she could not climb it in her current favored footwear.  So Callie went up.

 And Callie got pretty high!  then she got a little scared.

 And down she came.

 Rylee did not want to be left out and the 2 guys there were so thoughtful!  They hooked her up and let her try it!  Here she's sure she wants go go up the wall, but not sure about this harness.

She really did have a lot of help, but this is as high as she got.  And then she was done. 

Here she is with her 2 wonderful helpers.   

Dan was thoughtful enough to bring Marian her closed toed shoes and here she is, ready to conquer the wall! 

 Up she goes!

She was pretty quick and mostly sure-footed!

 And then, she hit the ledge, right before the top and lost her mojo.

And down she came.  She loved it!  

Marian went up twice, and Callie managed to get in 3 climbs.  They had a really good time and I am glad we managed to go for that last hour of fun.  They also had some bounce houses which is where we spent the rest of the time.  And the firemen with their truck, and a man passed out popsicles, and there was a ball toss activity.... and it was great!

Joshy Wishy Washy

Tonight Joshua claimed he was soooo bored.  Since he HAS been working on homework all afternoon, I did not suggest he do that.  I told him I needed a topic to blog about.  He said I should blog about him.  So here you have 5 things about my firstborn child, spoken from his very lips!

1.  If I had my own company, I would name it "Josh the Awesome".

2.  Favorite song is "White and Nerdy".

3.  I can do all my school stuff all by myself, including the Science Fair.  (His teachers have actually emailed me to tell me what a great kid he is and "what a pleasure he is to teach". Yeah, he rocks!)

4.  I have a friend that half the time doesn't even make sense.

5.  I like Annoying Orange. And Minecraft.

And now, the pictures Joshua has chosen to represent himself.  

 Fun with the iPad.

 Striking a heroic pose with his sisters.

Posing with his Mardi Gras loot.

Global Wildlife Center = a Good Time

This week was the kids' spring break.  As you know, we spent the first 2 days in Florida, and that should have been enough.  However, I did not want to have to come up with creative things to do at home to keep them from complaining they were bored.  Also, I have come to the conclusion that I never do fun things for 3 reasons.  

1.  They cost money. 

2. They require driving longer distances than I want to drive with children to get somewhere fun (anything over 20 minutes!).  

3. Its out of my comfort zone.  This means that when we live somewhere, I am perfectly happy saying no, I don't need to go there.  Once we move away, I then wish I had put forth the effort to do it.  

I have decided this year I am going to suck it up and do the fun stuff.  I'm not going to let cost and distance (reasonable distance!) get in the way.  Thus, today was the day we tackled the Global Wildlife Center!!  It was an absolutely crazy day.  The driving part stunk, but the kids LOVED the place.  I will not post all 76 pictures, but will merely give you a sampling of our day. 

We got to drive across Lake Pontchartrain!! Yep, the 25 mile bridge across it.  It was not very exciting, by the way.  The drive out was an hour an a half, and was made longer by disgraceful google maps MISdirections. But we made it there in plenty of time for the 1:15 tour. 

The kids had a blast teasing the gigantic carp in the pond while we waited.  The cost was pretty steep for me.  I normally would never pay so much to do this, but as I said, Carpe Diem!  It was $11 per kid and $17 for me.  Plus $30 for a giant bucket of food.  (The giant bucket of food was totally worth it, too!)

Here is that the safari tour looks like.  You get in this wagon (is it a wagon?!) and slowly drive through the 900 acre place.  The animals flock to you and you get to feed them!  How fun is that?!  Look at all the animals!!  They have 5 different varieties of deer there, plus other herbivores.  No carnivores, to Marian's mild disappointment.

We had the big bucket of food, and a bunch of cups to parcel it out in.  There were several ways to feed the animals. You could hold your cup and let the animals stuff their faces in them.  Or you could dump the food on the ground for them. 

 You could use the food to lure the larger deer in closer.  But you had to be careful!  The deer are expert ant grabbing your cups and running off with them!  We had the big bucket to refill our cups and had about 8 cups, so we were good. And we only lost one cup to a wily deer.

They had a camel.  Actually 2 camels.  So cute and interesting looking.  Quite placid as well.   Check out the deer to the right of the camel.  He's stolen a cup of food! He'll snack on it and drop the cup when there's no more food in it.  (The park workers will go out later to clean them up.)

I love Zebra!  The zebras were pushy and so cute.  But they bite, so we were told to be extra careful to to dump their food, not to hand feed at all. 

Did I mention how cute they are?! 

The kids had so much fun feeding all the animals. The animals were plentiful and there were always lots of them crowding around.  The safari wagon would stop here and there so you could check out some specific animals for a bit, like when the zebras showed up, and when we drove by the giraffe and camel.  The rest of the time it drove very slowly and you could feed the animals lingering and following.

They had a couple bison, Watusi and cow animals, but this "beefalo" was the only one who had enough energy to leave the shade and seek a snack. 

Me and Delaney.  She decided she was hungry here and refused to have any more fun.  

Oh, there were llamas too.  They were fun to feed, especially since they would eat out of your hand!

Have I mentioned how much the kids loved that they could feed the animals?!  They thought the safari tour was worth every penny.  It lasted just about 2 hours and there were animals the entire way around.  We ran out of food (that giant bucket of food that was touted to equal 20 of the 32 oz cups) well before the end, and the girls were scrounging food off the floor to feed the animals.

My thoughts were that it was fun.  It was fun for the kids and it was definitely fun to see the animals that close and to feed them.  However, I was also kind of sad to not get to see them act like the animals they are.  Perhaps it is a little bit travel-snobby but I recall in Africa, seeing the Topi standing on their little hills and the males keeping watch.  And it was so neat then to see them at attention and all that. It was awesome to see the animals running or grazing and being animals.  I shouldn't compare this trip to the real thing at all.  I should not have thought of this as anything like a real safari, because for what it was, it WAS great.

So if you ask the children, they will tell you that YES! it was a success and they are so glad we went.  I am happy they enjoyed it but I doubt we'll go back.  Drive time and money wise it was a lot.  But hey, the fun didn't end there!  On the way home (when the stupid GPS gave me rotten directions and drove us 20 miles out of the way around Lake Pontchartrain) we came to a standstill in traffic.  Why did we stop?  Well, there were still more animals to be seen!

Yep, we had to stop for a while for this guy right here!  Don't know where he came from or how he got there, but he was quite elusive!

Glamour Shots

Fine, there is no Glamour in these shots.  They are merely here to appease my father.  So, I give you.... pictures!

 This was Joshua's Science Fair Project. He came home with the assignment, researched and chose the project and then executed it all on his own.  He walked to the commissary himself to purchase the fruit, sliced it and studied it, took daily photos at 4:30 every day and wrote up his poster board.  All without any parental help.  (Unless you count the purchase of the pictures and poster board, which I do not!)  This kid ROCKS!

Marian was helping me make cookies.  While she waited for a batch to come out of the oven, she made this cookie-man.  She was so pleased with herself!

Dad complained that I didn't show any pictures with Nathan in them.  This is a shot of our Sabbath day stroll on the boardwalk.  3 of my girls and all 6 of Kera's children. Oh, and Delaney's giraffe.

 A group shot of most of Kera's brood, on the balcony of their room.  Yep, an ocean view!  Awesome!  Even more awesome is when we saw 3 dolphins swim by... from this very balcony.

A very cute Charlotte. 

 A very busy Matthew.

My 2 lovely oldest daughters. We did go to the beach for 15 minutes of pictures on Sunday.  Aren't they adorable?! 

So there you have it.  Some pictures for the grandparents.  Yes, we are back home.  And I we do have an exciting excursion planned for tomorrow.  So cross your fingers that it pans out and I will have some  great  things to post soon.  I hope!