I keep getting out of the swing of blogging (including commenting - sorry, friends!) so I thought I'd dive back in here with a little stream of consciousness post.
A one and a half year old does not need this many shoes. I can tell you when and why she got every pair, but I wouldn't want to bore you. It just confirms my original thought that I just need to go to Stride Rite or wherever and buy her one really good pair of everyday shoes, instead of umpteen pairs of cheapos. I know they're supposed to grow out of them quickly, but at this rate I think one quality pair will trump these half dozen cheap ones. Including in total money spent.
Actually, I'd rather she go barefoot all the time. We do a little in our yard, but it's not that luxuriously smooth and chemical-laden grass like the neighbors have. The thing is, I'd rather our children not roll around in chemicals, so weeds are right at home in our yard. As long as it's green, right? I mean, I did give in and let my husband buy grass seed so we didn't have the bare patches after last summer's killer heat. Grass itself is more of a weed than anything, so I was just going to let it come back on its own, but apparently we do have to do a bit of keeping up with the Jones' here in suburbia. Hopefully the Jones' don't hate us when our yard is the launching point for the neighborhood weeds.
Actually, our neighbors are great. Super great. I really love our little neighborhood, with its no through traffic and kids outside all the time. I do daydream about a neighborhood even better than ours, but that's just a dream. Someday I'll do a blog post on it and convince you all to join me in creating it. In the meantime, though, I have been so pleasantly surprised by how much I like suburbia and how much I love our neighborhood. The only thing I wish is that there were kids that were actually Miriam's age - they're all basically 5-12 years older than her. That's okay, though, because they dote on her and it's adorable. Almost like Bess in Little Men, only my girl is not so princess-like and I'm very happy about that. I've already got my babysitters all planned out.
Interestingly, our favorite kids in the neighborhood are the ones that go to Catholic school. That wasn't the main reason, but it's helped seal the deal in my mind that our kids are going to have to go to Catholic school. My husband's coming to the same conclusion. We discerned last year that homeschooling is not for us, to my great disappointment, and since then I really hadn't been able to figure out where Miriam would go to school. I still haven't, really. I keep asking, but I'm pretty sure God is shaking his head at my insistence on knowing right now! when we still have several years before it happens.
I don't think it's necessarily because the kids are Catholic that they're our favorites - they've never done or said anything explicitly Catholic. They don't walk around praying the rosary or pretending to be saints, to my knowledge. Perhaps it's because they go to church, period. When I asked some of the other neighborhood kids, they said they don't go to church, though then later they mention going to PSR (Parish School of Religion - like CCD or youth group for Catholic churches). Apparently their parents don't realize that simply sending their kids to the class isn't quite enough.
You know, the other thing these kids have in common is that they have/had stay-at-home moms when they were young. Now that they're mostly in school, the moms have gone back to work part-time or even full-time. I wonder what the biggest factor in all this is when it comes to raising our children to be good kids. (Note that I would say all the kids in our neighborhood are good - but the couple families I have in mind are just somehow a different level - it's hard to explain.) Staying at home when young? Going to church every week? Going to Catholic school? Going to private school? All the parents in our neighborhood are involved with their kids, so that doesn't seem to be it.
My musings are being interrupted by someone who wants me to put on her shoes. That's probably why the other mothers end up going back to work. To pay for the shoes.