muds, activities and health

Spring! It is such a lovely time of year! Our dogwoods are blooming and the Easter lillies have come and gone and the tulips are going now. Tulips are my favorite flower (as my child likes to remind me) and so I particularly enjoy seeing them pop up. The weather has been amazing lately. And, I would tell you all about how I have been too busy to post because I've been outside soaking up all the sunshiney goodness but you have known me too long to believe me. We've been out and about some, though it seems like it's always raining on the days we are going places. I'm not sure how we manage that.

So the mud* is back up and I am kind of remembering why I haven't spent the last six or eight years hanging out there. It is so fun and nostalgic and I'm enjoying the old routine of doing texty communications, but the players, alas, they are gone. I mean, now all of them, but most of them and those who are left are idle most of the day. There is a Facebook group devoted to old players and as everyone started reminiscing, at least two muds have come back online or are planning to do so, including "mine". I just wish my people were all back online too, though. You can't go home again, etc etc. I suppose I am just too sentimental for my own good. :)

*I've explained this before but for the benefit of those who weren't around then or who don't remember: Mud = a text-based game. It is the equivalent of World of Warcraft without fancy graphics, developed long before it was possible to do those fancy graphics and the direct ancestor of those games. It is also more fun than WoW, or it was in its day anyway. There are still active muds out there, but the kind that we played (aber) are relatively slow these days. M and I met there, almost fourteen years ago.

Navel-gazing treatise on Evie's extracurricular activities:

First of all, can you call it an extracurricular activity when she doesn't yet have curricular activities? I mean...really.

Anyway, I wrote about how ballet was a drag now. Promptly thereafter, she started liking it again and we had a nice heart-to-heart discussion in the car one day where I realized..she never did hate it. What she hates is that they're not doing enough BALLET at ballet. It's a class for little kids, you know, so they do stuff to make it more fun and less work. She expected to learn how to dance like Angelina Ballerina but they just do a few minutes of practice at a time and then move on to fun dances or tumbling time or whatever. Another mom told me before i signed her up that her daughter was frustrated at this very thing because she expected to be able to dance right away and didn't really see the way that all the little exercises and dance moves came together to be a full dance at the recital. Having said that, I guess anything is possible but I still don't want to do ballet next year. It's a matter of money, if nothing else. I think she is getting more benefit and enjoyment out of gymnastics and the cost of all these things is becoming prohibitive, especially since she will be starting violin lessons this year. We hope, assuming that we can find a good teacher. We have a really good lead on one, but we haven't contacted him yet. When Evie was about two, we went into a museum downtown because they had a luthier exhibit and..well, M is a luthier. It had to be done. They had an area set up with a guy there letting kids handle the instruments. She didn't care much for the guitar or the mandolin or the cello or the dulcimer but she picked up a bow and made one stroke across the fiddle and it made this perfect clear note and she has been set ever since. SHE WILL PLAY THE FIDDLE. M told her that she couldn't start lessons until she was at least five. Turns out that she will be five in a month and a half. Oi.

Anyway, fiddle and gymnastics and ballet and maybe swimming this summer and that is just TOO MUCH, both in time and money. I especially will not enjoy it after she starts kindergarten, I am sure. She is moving to the next class at gymnastics now. I think she should have done this a long time ago, but in the fall, she was the only kid in the class so it didn't matter much. In January, they restructured and eliminated certain class times and so the class is full again, but they're all littler kids and it's moving much too slowly for where she is. Not their fault, not the instructors fault, but not a good situation for her, either. Unfortunately, they don't offer the preschool II class on Thursday mornings, so I'm going to lose my weekly Thursday gymnastics routine. The class will be on Monday evenings instead, which I do not enjoy nearly as much. I do understand, of course, that kids in school can't do school hour classes so it makes sense but it's personally not convenient to me. AND, she won't have the same teachers because they're no longer there on Mondays. I took her to a make-up session yesterday afternoon and met the other teachers and... I don't want to judge them yet because she was again not really in the correct class for her skill level and they didn't know her yet either, but I am pretty sure I do not like them nearly as much. Evie is okay with it, which is both surprising and relieving. She honestly still loves gymnastics. She tends to want to give up when things do not come easily to her but she really throws herself into practicing her cartwheels and stuff. She's had a terrible time learning to do a cartwheel but she is finally GETTING it. She's just working on form now.

I am back on a healthy eating kick, and I tried stating back on the wii fit exercise last week and it made my ankle start hurting again. :( I guess it's not quite ready for that. Next time I'll have to be more careful of exercises that stretch the ankle. I think I know which one caused it. I'm thinking of trying to get into sparkpeople.. I know it's helped some people. I've signed up for it in the past but have never managed to do anything with it. I am sure I should be logging my food intake and all that for accountability but I really hate doing that. I wouldn't mind it if not for trying to figure out how many calories something has. Boooring. I have been considering going to the gym again but... eh. Maybe later on.

I guess it's time to go set today's craft project out. I took an empty bleach bottle and cut a door and windows out with an x-acto knife and now Evie needs to decorate it--it'll be a house for the polly pocket turned fairies that we made last week. (she colored three sets, front and back, of butterfly wings and then I laminated them and used elastic string to make arm holes to turn her dolls into fairies. They turned out really really well. No, I didn't come up with this myself and yes, it was from pinterest...sorta. I did see it on pinterest but it's from a blogger that I follow for her kids ideas. She has really really great ideas. link. Evie loved the wings last week so much that she insisted on bringing one to the library with her and she's not one of those kids that has to have random toys with her all the time. It was cute. :)