Making Lemonade and Finishing my Piece

We had to be adaptive yesterday, and it was one of the situations where good things come out of it and you appreciate the serendipity of life. As I may have mentioned in the past, our daughter A has a best friend, C, and they make a great pair. Really cute together, and C is a great kid. Good manners and sweet, though the relationship is a bit lopsided. In other words, C likes A a lot, but sometimes it seems not as much as A literally adores her. It borders on being unhealthy, and we are not going to intervene, but we feel A needs other distractions to occupy the time when she's not playing with C.

The situation is complicated by the fact that C goes to school, so she has a whole circle of friends outside of her interaction with A, while her life seems to revolve around C. She has other friends, we do things with other children all the time, and they are mostly school kids, but for some reason, when it comes to friendship, she doesn't mess around. Even when we we're with her other friends, some of whom I think are more her speed, she goes on about C, her best friend. I feel bad, like she's dissing her other friends.

Either way, it's a good lesson in backing off as a parent. We just hope that she finds some healthy balance in it all. For all it's worth, we think A makes a better friend than some of her other friends, whom we've been told can be mean and manipulative.

From an overbearing parent's perspective, if our kids were around kids like that, we couldn't help but step in, and I know that's a mistake, kids need to learn this stuff for themselves. But somehow I just can't handle the idea of people (especially our kids) being hurt, over and over again, but some asshole kid.

Anyway, I will say this-C is a good friend, even in lieu of the fact that she's been back in school and still wants to hang out with our kids. As I've mentioned, she's just a good kid and her parents good influence really shows.

We ran into a foil to our plans yesterday and had to adapt. We literally had to make lemonade when we had lemons. We went to the Wall to rock-climb and it was so crowded that they ran out of equipment-another reason, besides saving money, to get the kids their own stuff. It was the hip and stylish city crowd, up here for the Christmas holiday, and they took over in droves. It was a bit of a bummer, but we decided instead to go ice skating, and to try, for the first time, the local skating rink. And did we have a blast.

The rink is small, and there were about ten people already there, but everyone is nice, and everyone had fun. We even saw some friends from karate, Fran and her son, A. It was nice, not to mention free. We had a blast, and the kids came up with this game that was sort of like soccer with ice skates and snowballs. We had tons of fun, and the game really revealed how far along they've come in their skating because, as you might have guessed, it ain't easy to kick a snowball while ice-skating. It was a scream to watch and play, and well into the night the two of them were talking warmly about it.

It's all about the little things, isn't it?

I finally finished my piece, Father Time, for WAHM, and it feels good. I never know if it's good enough or for that matter, will be accepted, but such is the life of a writer. You are taking a leap of faith in believing that what anybody cares about what you have to say. It's a pretty big leap, I've found, but when land on your feet, it sure can be satisfying. Now that it's done, I can focus more on AC and PS/WB.

I'd also like to pitch more of my ideas, but have found the process of writing a query letter almost as difficult as writing the actual pieces. Even still, I've got to do this, it's sink or swim, as the saying goes.

Hopefully we'll make it to the rink again today, though it's New Year's Eve, and there is much to do. I got a little irritated with my wife because she's planning on working all day today, even though she has some say in the matter. What gets me is that I know she'll sell it as a short quick trip in, but it will evolve into a whole day and she'll end up coming home late. This may not be the case, and I could very well be wrong and have to eat my words, something I excel at. We shall see, I hope it's the case, because not only does the burden of being at home all day fall on me (I could use some help), but again, it's the holidays and at some point you have to take a step back and spend more time with the family.

Until the next time, thanks for reading.