Sheltered Jewelry

My beautiful daughter Aubry has decided to make beaded jewelry and sell it on Etsy.com so I thought I’d use my blog to promote her wonderful efforts. All of her profits from the her jewelry will go to purchasing dog and cat food and toys for our local animal shelter, Haven Humane Society. Please Help support her efforts in making a positive change. Her latest idea is to hopefully save enough money to help someone adopt one of the animals at the shelter. She wants to apply the money from the jewelry sales towards the adoption fee on an animal of her choice. So that way someone won’t have to pay the whole fee and the animal has a better chance of finding a forever home.

Click here to go to Aubry’s Etsy page to purchase some jewelry.

Click here to find out more about Haven Humane Society

Click here to look at the available animals for adoption.

No body puts Aubry in the corner

I’ve spent many years, ok well, 6 years to be exact. Raising my daughter to never take no for an answer, pursue your dreams, and try to do as much as you can on your own and never be afraid to ask for help. Seems about right….right? Well not as of recently. I’m continually being called by school office personnel, assistants, and other adults surrounding my daughter, because she can’t seem to control her stubbornness and inability to give a crap about what adults tell her to do. How dare you speak to the princess like that! Are you talking to me like that? Oh no she didn’t.

Marching to the beat of her own drum and deciding when and where she wants to sit and learn, she seems to think it’s up to her. I don’t remember telling her she didn’t have to listen to her teachers. I don’t remember telling her she can just take other people’s belongings. And I certainly don’t remember allowing her to treat other’s rudely.

I love her with all my heart and I’m so proud of everything she does, even when it’s burping louder then most people. (She gets it from me) But I don’t want her kicked out of kindergarten because she kicked another student. I don’t want her kicked out of her after-school program because she stole their office keys. I need to rein in her Girl Power and start pulling some of her magic dust back in.

Maybe I gave her too much to start with. Now I need to start teaching her to use it sparingly. Like most kids her age it should have been apparent when I seen her use of glitter in art class. I could spot her project from the parking lot. Less is more, was never an option for my Aubry. But this is a time now where I need to show her patients, relaxation, and understanding.

You can be a fighter and you can be strong, but if you don’t know when to choose your battles or when excessive force is not ok, then it’s not going to be a tool for her, it’s going to be her kryptonite.

::::UPDATE::::While she was sitting in time out she stole my lotion, cell phone charger and a package of batteries from the table sitting to the left of her in the above picture…Lord have mercy.

Playing S.E.R.R.F

After a long hard days work, I travel 35 miles to my hometown of Red Bluff California. Before heading home I have to stop by my children’s school and pick them up from their after school program called S.E.R.R.F. Pronounced as, Surf.

Immediately as you walk in, you’re greeted by loud children talking and a bustle of adults and older teenagers participating with them in various activities. Every thing from painting and coloring to singing and dancing on the Wii. I’ve grown comfortable with this group of adults watching over my children. They know me by my ever present and loud children, as my daughter often dominates all the other children and her budding fashion sense has them captivated by her charm and beauty, and the fact that she is constantly whining about not getting her way.

Signing the children in and out in the many binders placed on the all to short tables. (the lunch room tables that fold into the surrounding walls…remember?) The SERRF adult sitting at these tables, calls over the 2-way radio for the children by name, belonging to whatever parent is standing in front of her. These SERRF adults are often wearing lanyards with keys attached to them, for the numerous rooms and lockers that they may need to get into. After a short conversation, my children come running to me, back packs in hand. With a hug and a kiss, we set off to our car parked in the busy parking lot.

This weekend I walked in on my daughter sitting at her computer desk in her princess room decorated in all-thing’s-girlie and pink. Placed strategically in front of her on the carpet are her many lovies, a.k.a. stuffed animals. She reaches for her Disney princess walkie-talkie motions to me to wait a minute with her dainty finger and calls out, “We need Leo the Lemur. Your mom’s here to pick you up. She stands up, walks over to her bunk bed and hands me a clipboard. It’s then that I notice she has a lanyard around her neck with a bunch of foreign keys.

(Now for about a week she has bugged me every day to give her my car keys so she can have them. I declined and had to explain to her why I couldn’t part with them but promised I’d find her some old keys she could keep. Unfortunately I never came through on this promise as I later realized I never held on to useless keys like my dad use too.)

I immediately stopped in my tracks and gave her the mommy-eye asking her, “Aubry. Where did you get those keys?”.

She quickly shot back, “From the prize box at school. I didn’t get in trouble and Mrs. Bliss let me pick them out.”

Against my better judgment I didn’t want to rain on her parade and take her prize away. I knew she had been working really hard at not talking so much in class. Being even more curious as to what she was doing, even though I could tell–secretly I just wanted to hear her say it. “What are you playing Aubry?” I asked.

“I’m playing surf.” She said as if the mere question was ridiculously obvious. She gave that away in the roll of her eyes as she turned back around to resume her play, uninterrupted this time.

Let’s jump now to Monday evening, me standing in front of the short tables starring at the huge green chalk board. Scrawled  across in yellow chalk it read; MISSING 3 ROOM KEYS IF FOUND PLEASE RETURN. (see picture above) Immediately in that moment I knew who was to blame, my sweet and innocent, all too grown-up acting, diva daughter, Aubry. I had brought them the news they were searching.

I approached the director and informed them of my findings this weekend as I walked into my daughters room. After the hysterical laughter, they were relieved. As the director was in huge trouble. The school was about to set out on a costly mission of re-keying every door to the school after not being able to lock the doors or set the alarms this last weekend.

I safely returned the keys to the director the next day and expressed my deepest apologies that I could. I asked the director how Aubry had gotten a hold of the keys. She told me, “Aubry got in trouble for not listening and was placed in time out in the directors office, where the keys were hung up on the wall.”

It’s sad to say, but Aubry is probably going to fall in to my footsteps and this post will more then likely be placed in the now, appropriately named, “Classic Aubry” category.