(Santa and his sleigh are on Alyssa’s nails.)

Unfortunately, Alyssa has weird nails and hair… nail polish never sticks for very long (she doesn’t chew it off, it just DISAPPEARS!), and hair dye (I’ve given her a streak of hot pink, and more recently a steak of bright purple) fades super-quick, even though she’s been careful to use only my sulfate-free shampoo, so even though it’s been just two days from application, some of the red and green has disappeared. :/ Maybe we’ll try base and top coats next time. Oh well – it’s still cute, and I don’t mind doing her nails again!

I own four pairs of glasses from Zenni Optical. All are plastic frames, with basic eyeglass prescriptions. Two are rectangular in shape, with crystals on the outer edge of both sides of the frames. One is black with a blue interior, while the other is a very dark brown with a reddish-pink interior. The third pair is rectangular but more angular at the corners; the frames are black with a bright green interior. And the fourth pair are round, black, kind of cat-eye/retro, with a whole smattering of crystals on the outer part of the frames.

To expand on this post’s subject line — yes, Zenni Optical has prescription eyeglasses for kids! When Alyssa was diagnosed with mild nearsightedness last September, my first thought was, “There is no way in hell I am sending my six year old off to school and out to play in overpriced glasses!” As soon as I had her prescription in hand I came home, pulled up zennioptical.com, sat down with Alyssa and picked out two pairs of glasses. Here are her choices:

Zenni’s prices rock, and they deliver fairly quickly — within two weeks of ordering. But don’t just take my word for it. Check out this Examiner article!

to this:

Ah well. In any case, it has been an amazing six years, and here’s to many, many more! ♥

(I’m glad I got photos, but I wish I had thought to whip out the camcorder!)

Alyssa attends morning half-day kindergarten five days a week; Ryan attends an autistic support preschool on Tuesdays and Thursdays during the afternoon, and a mainstream preschool (with a TSS) on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays in the morning. Yes, that really is three school schedules to handle. Yes, it is a pain. But I have all three schools’ calendars hung on the side of our refrigerator, and bus pick-up and drop-off times written down in my MomAgenda, on my whiteboard (I have one next to my computer desk to help me keep track of work and product reviews and such), and on my cell phone.

Anyway, with the busy school schedules means earlier bedtimes! Last year the kids went to bed by 8:30pm, since they didn’t have to get up until 8:45am or so. But with Alyssa’s school bus coming at 8:30am, we’re obviously getting her up earlier — and Ryan as well, since he has a knack for popping out whenever Alyssa does — by about an hour. So come 5:00pm, I’m pressed for time because I need to make dinner, get the kids bathed, changed, and ready for bed, and then IN bed no later than 7:15pm, so they can unwind and fall asleep by 7:30pm.

Whew! It’s a crazy evening rush, but it’s worth it for the several hours of quiet time I then have to myself. ♥ Then I get time to work (articles, SEO stuff), play (blogging), shop (checking out plus size swimsuits), whatever!

Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll be going today. It’s a good day for it, as it’s sickly humid, and the sun is out, but I just have too much to do. Mondays are my busy days, and today is no exception. I have several thousands words to write on wedding favors, and then I have a few other tasks to wrap up. By then it’ll be time for dinner, and then time to send the kids off to VBS (vacation bible school) for two hours.

The pool has been open for just about three weeks, and we’ve been there six times already. We have also gone to another pool, one at the local YMCA, that I’d love to go to again, except I don’t have the $272 to get in. See, it’s at the YMCA, which charges $63.98/mo for a family membership. Not a big deal, right? But then there’s the $99 “investment” fee. Oh — and the best BS of all — the outdoor pool (the cool one with the slide and water buckets and umbrellas and really nifty shallow end) isn’t included in a YMCA membership. But if you have a membership, a season pass is “just” $110, as opposed to the non-membership season pass fee of $350.

Crazy, huh? I mean, we’ll go ahead and do it, next paycheck, since we want to go to the YMCA regularly. But it chafes knowing that there’s the kick-ass pool that IS a part of the YMCA complex, run by them and everything, yet it has to be paid for separately. Grrr.

When I was kid I was into dressing up to match the traditional colors of a holiday. Now? Not so much. It’s funny, the things you “give up” as an adult. I love being an adult, but you know, sometimes I really do miss being a kid…

Speaking of kids, the local playground was crawling with them today. It was too beautiful to pass up playing outside, so after I picked up the kids from preschool, I took them down to the local park and turned them loose. I pushed them on the swings, helped them climb the monkey bars and slide down one of those swirly fireman’s poles, and followed them around with my camera and snapped a few shots (note to self: process those photos tomorrow!). We were at the park for at least an hour. We would have stayed longer, but Ryan said he had to go to the bathroom, and Alyssa said she was hungry, so home we went, with visions of potties and sandwiches dancing through our heads.

While at the playground I’m pretty sure I met Alyssa’s match in terms of flounciness. There was a little girl, maybe 7 or 8, who was huffing and flouncing because her mom wouldn’t let her take off her long-sleeved shirt. As it turns out, the girl had exzema, and her mom said (to the girl, not to me; I was just a bored eavesdropper) that she had to wear long sleeves so the sun wouldn’t irritate it. Does the sun do that? I always thought people with eczema wore long sleeves because they didn’t want to have others seeing their condition.

But yeah, the whole flounciness? That girl had it going on. Eye rolling, hand on him, hair flipping, the whole she-bang. Her little sister (presumably) was almost as bad. After watching them for a few minutes and wincing in sympathy for the exasperated mother, I definitely thought again how lucky I am to have a boy and a girl. Sure, Ryan is a little brute and is a typical rough, tumbling little boy, but I’ll take that over twice the flounciness as I already have to put up with!

Alyssa loves playing games on our computers. She goes from Nick Jr (nickjr.com) to Itza Bitza to whatever it is that we happen to find for her. Dan recently signed her up for the Burger King kids club, which she was happily playing in that photo. What’s scary is that in addition to playing these games, she knows how to turn on and shut down the computer, open up Paint, pull up the Cybercam program and take cam pics, and find puppy videos on YouTube (I’m thinking that my mom taught her how to spell dog and/or puppy ). And to think, she doesn’t yet know how to read!

I can already see the writing on the wall: by the time Alyssa is eight, she’ll be asking for her own laptop!