flora – Page 2 – hellomelissa.net

A small start to a new year

January 1, 2013January 1, 2013 by Melissa Price-Mitchell

Why it’s probably a good thing we don’t go out on New Year’s Eve:

Sean just popped the bubbly and I nearly soiled myself.

— melissa (@mpricemitchell) January 1, 2013

What can I say? Loud noises scare me.

We spent our evening flipping between college football, kid’s TV and old music videos. I didn’t have remote privileges or much veto power so I worked on (and finished) the book I was reading. When Flora went to bed, Sean and I poured ourselves a few drinks and had a few laughs while watching more old music videos.

Today has been lazy, but not a complete write-off. We took down the Christmas tree and decorations earlier this afternoon. I made beef stew in the slow cooker knowing I wouldn’t want to come up with dinner after a long day at home. Flora spent most of the day in her new ballerina outfit and I spent most of my day in my jammies. We’re both dressed now, but she is wearing a summer dress that is much shorter than it was last summer.

A perfect illustration of time moving forward.

I feel like I should have all these grand plans for 2013. I’m not ready to make any big commitments yet, but I’m thinking about stuff. I want to succeed with small changes – and honour those successes – before I proceed to any major overhauls.

For now, I’ll go with this:

This is author Ami McKay’s Pledge for Digital Humanity. I printed this image out from her blog post “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”. It’s on my desk at work. I find it inspiring there, but probably need to apply the pledge outside of work too.

That’s a start. Happy New Year.

A cure for the November blahs?

November 15, 2012November 15, 2012 by Melissa Price-Mitchell

When I picked Flora up from school today, I had to sit in my car for an extra minute or two to pull myself together. I’ve got a serious case of the November blahs. Add an exhausting day at work, a busy commute and I had a small case of the sads by the time I hit the school.

I peeked in the window where the kids were playing. I love watching Flora when she doesn’t know I’m watching her. It gives me insight into how she sees the world.

I waited at the door and she soon came running to give me the biggest hug.

I really needed that.

As she was getting her stuff on, she handed me a piece of paper.

I made this for you mama.

For those who don’t have kids learning to write and draw right now, it’s a card with lots of hearts. It says “Mom” on the front and the back.

I almost teared up in the hallway of the school.

I thanked Flora for her card. I told her it was just what I needed. And it really was.

I have an awesome kid. I want to be like her when I grow up.

She Wins

November 7, 2012November 6, 2012 by Melissa Price-Mitchell

I started leaving the house at 6:15am this summer to start my work day a little earlier. At the time, I didn’t give much thought to when I would be both going to and coming home from work in the dark. I just wanted to be done work at 4pm so I was able to pick up my kid and be home before 6:30pm. That part works well, but now that it’s dark in the morning and at night, those early mornings can be a little rough. See this tweet from last week:

Okay this leave-in-the-dark, return-in-the-dark stuff is bullshit. #CommuterLife

— melissa (@mpricemitchell) October 29, 2012

Sean and Flora are usually still asleep while I get ready. I usually poke Sean awake enough to tell him I’m leaving, Flora’s lunch is packed, to drive safe and that I love him before I kiss him goodbye. Sometimes I even get a response beyond “mmrphh”. I then go into Flora’s room, kiss her on the cheek, whisper my I love you and leave the room quietly. I go downstairs, grab my bags, turn out the lights I turned on and off I go.

Now that we’re no longer on Daylight Savings Time, we’re all a bit screwed up. Flora is zonked by bedtime and I’ve spent the last couple of days both not wanting to get up, and not wanting to go to bed, so I’m fighting it on both ends. The nights feel so late now that it’s pitch black so much earlier than usual.

Not sure why this extra hour screws us up so much – it’s not like this time change business is a new thing.

This morning I got up and got ready as usual. I was running a little late, but nothing awful. As I was saying goodbye to Sean I heard little feet and told him “we have a friend coming in”. Soon a little girl in a Hello Kitty nightgown came in to use our bathroom. I told Flora I was leaving and that I was late.

She looked at me and asked, “Am *I* late?”

“No baby, you’re fine. Come down with me and you can get a cereal bar and I’ll give you a hug before I go.”

Flora held my hand as we walked down the stairs together. I opened her cereal bar and got my hug. She went back upstairs to talk Sean into some early-morning cartoons. I was doing a couple of last-minute chores before I could finally leave when I heard her yelling something unintelligible at me. On the third time I asked her to repeat myself, she finally said it clearly.

“One more hug mama.”

Like most working parents (edit – like *all* parents), I hold on to oodles of guilt surrounding how I balance my family, my marriage, my work, my life, and myself. We have an okay system, but it doesn’t take much for that system to unravel. I don’t always make the right decision at the right moment. I do what I can to keep as many people at least a little bit happy all of the time. Most of the time, I do okay, but I wish it wasn’t always so hard.

It wasn’t a hard choice to give my daughter one more hug. I need those hugs as much as she does. Those extra moments remind me that Sean and I are Flora’s advocates. No one else will have her back like we do. She will learn – is learning – so much from her teachers and other adults in her life, but she needs to learn how a family treats each other from us. How to form healthy relationships. How to be thoughtful and kind.

And, like it or not, teaching my daughter those things are more important to me than catching the 6:39 train into Union Station.

She wins. She has to.

Living out rockstar dreams in my car

October 28, 2012 by Melissa Price-Mitchell

Sometimes I think the only time I get to use my whole voice is when I sing.

I don’t sing professionally and I hate all the singing shows on TV. My singing is limited to my car, games of Rock Band and rare karaoke nights.

I’m not a good singer – I wreck my throat after one karaoke song and I’m completely untrained. I like music but I’m not as up-to-date on current trends as I used to be.

When I was a teenager, I learned to play my favourite songs thanks to OLGA. That site is long gone – a casualty of the ongoing battle of the music industry versus the internet. I even wrote a few songs. I never played them publicly, but if I’d had better self-esteem at seventeen, I may have.

Those songs are long gone now. I can hear snippets in my head, but not much else. We’re all probably better off – the songs of a seventeen year old girl with an acoustic guitar pining for boys who wouldn’t understand aren’t songs for the ages.

These days, I sing along with the radio in my car. Now that I’m a commuter, I have more time in the car alone. Most nights the radio goes up loud and I feel free. I feel subversive when I roll into Flora’s school blasting something inappropriate. Then I turn it off and go get my kid. We ride home in silence most days because my girl doesn’t get loud rock music yet.

She may not ever, in the ultimate act of rebellion against her parents.

Fun fact: When I was pregnant, we tried to get Flora to kick by putting headphones on my belly. Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’ was on my mp3 player and that’s what we tried with. She completely ignored us. Whatever – babies are fickle and kick when they want to. The day we brought her home, Sean had the radio on and Enter Sandman comes on again. The radio wasn’t loud but as I sat in the back with my newborn in a shell-shocked, WTF-do-I-do-now haze, I smiled because life was still happening even though I was now someone’s mother. I still liked the same loud music I did before I became Her Mother. That comforted me. That it was the same song that we tried to get her to kick for was an added bonus.

It took me a long time to learn to like to sing. On my first day of kindergarten, I decided I didn’t want to sing Head and Shoulders with the class. I did the motions but didn’t sing. My teacher noticed and asked me why I wasn’t singing. I didn’t answer. She then put her hands on her hips and asked me to say sorry for not singing with the class. I didn’t because I wasn’t sorry. I didn’t want to sing and I wasn’t doing it. The teacher didn’t like my silent defiance and I was told to go put my head down at one of the classroom tables.

In third grade, I was one of maybe seven kids in my class that was not invited to join the choir made up of primary-level kids (grades 1-3). Maybe it was because there wasn’t enough room for everyone on the stands. Maybe it was because they thought I was too shy (a reasonable assumption). I took it to mean they thought I was a bad singer. I did my extra reading and was happy but my relationship with singing took a huge hit for years afterward.

I think these stories lead up to why I like karaoke so much. It’s a forgiving medium. You can completely suck and still be cheered at the end. It’s hard to get up in front of people and make yourself vulnerable by singing. I think most people recognize that.

I subscribe to the theory “if you can’t sing it good, sing it loud”. This applies to life as well. Better to get up, own your issues and go for it anyway, than sit in the back and be mad that you wimped out yet again. I’ve done both, and I have lot more fun (or get a lot more said) when I actually get brave enough to potentially make a jackass of myself in public.

I know I’m not as good as I think I am in my head. I’m not as bad as I think I am either. At least I’m trying.

You should too. You don’t have to get on stage to try.

This is why you hire a pro to take your family portrait

September 19, 2012September 19, 2012 by Melissa Price-Mitchell

This is why you hire a pro to take your family portrait #NotQuiteInThePicture, a photo by MPriceMitchell on Flickr.

Flora was home with the sniffles yesterday so I worked from home to be with her.

I started my day at the office so I got to do the cliché commuter thing and head back to Union station and wait an hour for the next train since I missed the train I was hoping to catch.

I may have whisper-screamed a very bad word when I watched the train drive away. I’m a lady so I won’t repeat it here.

After supper, we decided to all have a snuggle on the couch. Sick kids like to snuggle.

Flora then decided we should take a picture of the moment. I took some with the front-facing camera on my phone so I could try to compose them, and some with the regular camera so they were better quality.

Most pictures were shaky, blurry, blown-out messes (see the other one I posted on Flickr – we look kinda cute, but the picture looks awful), but this one makes me smile.

It also reminds me to get a family portrait taken by a professional. When we’re all dressed and not flopped at unflattering angles on the couch in weird light.