Busy day

Storytime at Altadena Library, good news from the city of Pasadena building depart, and South Pasadena farmers market. And I found out my piano is in good shape no need for an expensive tuning.
Well 3 late nights in a row is way too much for this 35 yr old to handle.
Good Night

Banner Makin' Fool

Here's what i did last night. I HAD to do a girlie banner with all the frills and flourishes

Name Banners

This is what I've been doing instead of blogging. Much more fun. I'm working on one for my niece right now. And then I think I'm going to have to do one for Ari & Jojo.

Forgot to Blog

Well I was so busy scrap booking last night I forgot to blog. I went to a crop (a gathering of people who all scrapbook. Usually in a big room with plenty of layout space.)at my local scrapbook store Kat Scrap Studios. I finished 3 of 4 projects I had on my list. I was totally jazzed. The ladies are cool and very creative.

Today the girls went to their first birthday party with face painting. Jojo was having none of it so she ended up with a "tattoo" on her arm. Ari i=on the other hand LOVED it. She didn't even want to wash it off tonight. We'll see how much is left in the morning. LOL

Scrapbooking

I have vowed not to go to bed until I finish journaling (writing captions) in our 2008 scrapbook. This way I can say the album is finished. I've actually made a spreadsheet with all the scrapping I have to do. Yes, anal but it helps. So back to it...

Sleep

Today Jojo fell asleep right after dinner, and I went to bed with her. She'll be up at the crack of dawn, but I needed the rest. Off to sleep some more.

Hair Day

I've always told people I wanted boys because I didn't wanna "deal" with hair. Well now that I have 2 girls I'm "dealing" with hair. Today everybody got their hair done. I've found that Jojo's hair doesn't do well with braids so she has a bunch of ponytails that I clear out every couple of days. At one point I was trying to do it everyday but it just takes waaaay to long. Maybe when she's older and can sit still. Ari's hair does great in braids/cornrolls, the problem is taking them out. Every time there ready to come out I say "Ari, we need to take out your hair". She has two standard responses if it's daytime she says "OK, at night-night time"; if it's nighttime she says "ok but tomorrow not tonight". So I have to start talkin to her about it days in advance.
I read an article recently that has help me look at my time with my girls differently. As a time to cherish because all to quickly they will be grown and gone. Now, that is how I "start" each session how it ends weeeell, let's just say I'm workin on me.

PS
Below is the article I couldn't find a link sorry, I'm still workin on this blog technology...

Balm: By styling her daughters' hair each morning, she was attending to something deeper than a beauty ritual

By Lonnae O'Neal Parker (WashingtonPost)
Sunday, January 31, 2010; W20



Soon now, these days will be gone from me.

As I settle myself on the couch, my 11-year-old daughter, Savannah, brings me her hair basket: comb, water bottle, hair grease, barrettes. She plants herself on the floor, squarely between my knees, and I begin my work. There's the everyday hair-doing, but wash day takes more time, and slowly I separate the thick, kinky tangle growing from her head. I rub in a dollop of grease -- Kemi Oyl or root stimulator lotion, but mostly just dark blue Ultra Sheen (I like the standards) -- to make the hair obedient, and part it into sections, clipping each firmly to her head.

My hands are slower and gentler now than they were when she was younger and I was younger, with a career to chase, and an older daughter who had her own head of hair for me to do, and another baby yet to come.

Sometimes, if I was pressed for time, I could get by with a few surface brush strokes and a liberal application of gel to make the girls passably presentable, but it took 20 minutes of work to make them look special. Twenty minutes to make them feel pretty so that neighbors would comment on the straightness of their parts. Twenty minutes to be reassured that I'd sent my children into the world making clear that they were valued and loved. Twenty minutes. Every day. Minimum. Apiece. For me to feel assuaged that if one day, please, God, no, they suddenly disappeared, I could persuade the 24-hour cable networks that my girls really were worthy enough to be news-- because, after all, black mothers can't recall a time where missing black women and children got national media attention.

Back then, when I craved only sleep, my children's tears -- because there is an unassailable physical hurt to the pulling and detangling of black girl hair -- often left me unmoved or impatient, or sometimes mingled with my own tired tears. Because, like my mother before me, I had so many other things to attend to.

My mother, a Chicago schoolteacher for 33 years, combed my hair and my sister's hair for 35 minutes every morning in her slip so as not to get hair grease on her work clothes. She reminds me of how much those mornings used to hurt. "You'd want to turn around and look at me with all this woe on your face so that maybe I would stop," Momma remembers. "But, you know, I couldn't stop, because you had to have your hair combed." And she had to get to work. And every two weeks, when she washed my hair, "it would be all over your head, like you had an afro the size of a small umbrella and that had to be pulled back down in something I could reasonably deal with."

Years ago, it was easy to lose sight that this ritual, this touching of my children every day, had an expiration date. But now ours is close.

I begin at the nape of Savannah's neck and make my first row of two-strand twists small and precise. The style is much like the one that first daughter 11-year-old Malia Obama wore last year on her first day of school in Washington, and this summer in Rome and at Martha's Vineyard. For us, children favored by the sun, whose natural kinks want nothing more than to stand at attention all over our heads, this hair thing between mothers and daughters goes back to the beginning, and I wonder if Malia's momma washes and twists her hair on Sunday afternoons, too. Or if the first lady knows how quickly this time with our girls slips away. Probably not. When our oldests are still young, we think they'll stay that way forever.

***

With more than an hour of parting and twisting ahead, and no place for either of us to go, Savvy and I talk. She wants to know if she can go to school for fashion design and if I like the name Harlowe for a girl. She tells me how she's the guitarist for "Black Dragon," the rock band she's formed with Nia and Alexis, although she can't play guitar, and how none of the Goosebumps books are scary, but "in terms of creepiness," "Chicken, Chicken" is worse than "Ghost Beach." She says she started reading "The Diary of Anne Frank" and that it made her angry that the Jews had to give the Nazis their bikes.

Such is the nature of hair space in my house; it is a time for rumination and a time for prattle.

"Mommy, I don't want you to call me Savvy anymore. My new name is Sav Sav," Savannah announced to me one day. "And I don't want you to call me Savannahsaurus Rex. My new nickname is Sav Sav Rex."

Sometimes, over barrettes and tonics, we go deep.

It was hair time on the green couch when my oldest daughter, Sydney, then 5, came to the realization that she was different from the girls on the commercials; that her hair would never reach for her waist. "Even when I get older?" She cried; I cried; her godmother, Dana, cried.

It is, for little black girls, that "For Whom the Bell Tolls" moment when Miss Clairol comes for you. When you are just old enough to realize what the culture prizes as beautiful and just old enough to know that you aren't it. Non-black mothers whose daughters have ample thighs or flat chests or who fret about the shape of their eyes doubtless know the moment. But black people are the only ones in the world with black people hair, so our daughter's pain is ours alone. It is a moment when even a mother's love is not nearly enough comfort, but it's the only balm we have.

Savannah, whose hair is longer and curlier than Sydney's, was more resigned in her hair epiphany. She wondered why hers was so kinky. As the children's book says, we are "Happy to Be Nappy," I tried to explain to her cheerfully, but Savannah was skeptical. Nappy hair is hard to comb, she said, and wondered why she should be happy that her hair was hard to comb. "But okay, whatever."

"Did they have color television when you where a kid?" Savannah asks, breaking my reverie. I murmur affirmations as I twist. I chime in when appropriate or, under the guise of detangling, rhythmically knead my fingertips in her scalp until her eyelids start to fall. My daughter is right there on the brink of growing up, already showing signs of the woman she'll become. Her legs are longer now, and her T-shirts no longer lay flat against her ribs. My features are becoming more pronounced in her face. I keep rubbing, prolonging our time as I listen to her words or her sweet, untroubled silence.

As it happened with her sister before her, I will lose this intimacy with my last daughter to friends and parties and, worst of all, to boys and, eventually, men and children; to people who will come to mean more to her everyday life than I ever will again. I have been such a harried mother with Savannah, so distracted by the constant demands of husband and career and other children, and now, just as I'm looking up, my youngest daughter is almost beyond the old rituals. So I rub her scalp for the times I combed her hair hard, for the times I rushed through her kinks too quickly, for the times I yelled when I wish I had whispered. For the time I spanked her harder than I meant to for erasing an hour-long interview I had typed on my computer. I grease her hair and rub her scalp.

Let this be the hand she remembers.

In little more than an hour, our time is over. Savannah scarcely gives me a moment to admire her, this luminous little girl poised for adolescence, all mine for just seconds before she's off to find her soccer ball, her friend Pearl and the whole wide rest of her world.

It's okay, I console myself. Her sister still kisses me every night and sometimes asks me to roll her hair, so I know I won't lose this connection with Savannah altogether. Our time together will merely change. I lie across the couch, weary from my labor, and my own eyelids grow heavy. Savannah comes back to retrieve something and pauses. She lays a blanket across my length and gently tucks the ends under my sides.

Drifting off to sleep, I smile. Even without a comb in my hand, I think these days will never really be gone from me.

Lonnae O'Neal Parker is a Washington Post staff writer. She can be reached at oneall@....

Mondays!?!?!?!?!

Boy I thought I would stop hating Mondays when I stopped working a 9 to 5. Well maybe part of the problem is staying up til 2am on Sunday night. hehehe Well I'm going to correct that tonight, off to bed.

Today was a good day

It started off great. My Dear Husband let me sleep in until 10 am, then I was able to clean the house pretty much uninterrupted, and go grocery shopping all by myself. I also managed to get most of the laundry done. Hey what can I say these are the highs of a "Domestic Goddess". LOL Have a great week everyone.

Happy Sabbath

Today Ari woke up looking for Tia Becky. When Ari realized Tia Becky wasn't in the house she started to wail. Ari recovered from the "trauma" and had a great day at church. After church we saw Tia Becky and Mr. Jamie for lunch at Saladang in Pasadena. We all over ate and the girls went into a food coma on the ride home. After Ari's 2 hr nap I thought it would be a good idea to take Jamie up on his invitation to his sister's party. Ari had a great time but she didn't tire herself out enough because... SHE IS STILL UP!!!!!!

Tia Becky's Visit

Tia Becky came to town last night after Ari went to sleep. So this morning Ari was surprised and very excited. Jojo was a little reserved at first, as usual, but she warmed up too. We went to IKEA or as Ari calls it "the meatball store" and then went to Library to watch "The Princess and the Frog". AND Mami got to go to yoga. All in all it was a good day.

Pre-Licensing Visit

Today was my scheduled pre-licensing visit for my daycare. The last step to getting my license. I have been pretty stressed out getting ready. I had to "child proof" the house, clean the house, vaccinate Diva, and get my safety gear. But the whole thing went very well the analyst did not have any complaints and was very impressed with me. So i will have to wait about 2 weeks to become official. WOO HOO!!! now to start advertising...

A Chemical Pregnancy

So before I went to sleep Monday I took another digital pregnancy test and it was negative. I was still hopeful when I went to sleep but I woke up to proof that i wasn't pregnant. I'm a little sad it would have been great to have baby #3. But you know what they say, "If at first you don't succeed try, try, and try again.
So I missed yesterday because I really didn't want to blog about it. The whole reason for the blog was to talk about my third pregnancy. So I had to decide if i would even continue. I think I will and just have fun with it. Who knows maybe it will be a baby blog eventually...

Going tp Bed Early

So since I promised myself I'd write something every night. Good Night

Sick as a dog

It's official all the Awori girls are sick with the flu/cold. Jojo woke up this morning sneezing some awful mucus. Ari woke up complaining of her leg hurting, my leg was also sore. you know that kinda sore/ body ache from the flu. I actually took a nap today. I'm hoping today was the worst of it.

Our New Adventure

Well I just found out there will be an addition to the Awori west clan. Yeap, I'm pregnant AGAIN. I'm actually pretty excited about it. Nick is worried sick over the cost and hoping for a boy. We haven't told the girls yet, I want to wait a bit longer.
So according to the Internet due date calculator the baby is due December 10, 2010. Ari and the new baby will be a little less than 4 yrs apart and Jojo and the baby will be 2 1/2 yrs apart. pretty good separation in my opinion.
So here's hoping this baby sticks I'm only 5 wks along a feel a little superstitious announcing so early.
Liliana