We get to the mall, check in for exams, and start looking for frames, my boys are like BAM,
"Mama, I like these, are they ok?"
I'm like, "Awesome, yea they look great!"
Done. 2 out of 3 frames picked in less than 5 minutes.
Then there's my 13 yr old girl.
She's .... special...and I swear I don't mean that in a derogatory mean way...she really is though..everything with her is so..... "extra"? Is that what that means, I don't have any other way to explain it...it has to be so difficult.
She immediately says she wants these large black frames, that were too big and too contrasting for her...once I explained that she was immediately crushed yet continued to only choose black wide frames too big for her face.
I ask her which brand of frame she thinks are nicest..she says "Guess". So we go to the Guess wall, and I'm looking and I find a pair with blue inner frame and the tortoisey outer frame. Still brown, but with some light tones for her pale blue eyes and blonde/brown hair and fair skin...she says "hmm ok" but her face was just so unhappy. She said she liked the colored ones, so I chose some fun speckled purples, greens, reds, blues, no frames, plastic frames, metal frames, half frames...I was pretty sure we were all going home with pink eye after the number of frames she put on her face! haha
As we are driving home, we pass a sports bar with a bit of open land between it and the next hotel on that little road, and it is trashed. It looks like people just park there and see who can throw the most trash the furthest into the field. It looked awful. My before picture doesn't begin to show you how bad it was.
My daughter, being the little environmentalist she is sometimes, said "Mama, could I pick up that trash? We have some plastic Aldi bags back here..."
I say, "yea, but I'm not going to keep those bags, we will just drop them at the dump on the way home".
She gets out, grabs gloves and a bag and starts picking up.
Let me also add, as you can sort of see in the pics, it was not nice out yesterday. It was grey and cold and had been raining for days...it was muddy and wet and gross.
Yet she worked hard, walking all around bending over and picking up 5 aldi bags of trash, plus a box she found and filled and a big trash bag she found and filled.
But she did it. And she earned her choice of pizza this weekend and a weird doll thing with teeth...Fuggler I believe it's called? I dunno,I think it's creepy, but she loves it..
When she does these things it makes me feel like I have actually done something right, raising her, and it makes me feel guilty for getting so frustrated with her behaviour at any other given moment.
She has ODD. If you are unfamiliar with ODD, it is Oppositional Defiant Disorder. When the child has issues with following directions from authority figures. Usually, they are also very obnoxious and lash out at people and yell and can become violent. She has all the clinical text book symptoms EXCEPT for yelling/lashing out at me, the authority figure. I believe that may be coming as we get into the teens a bit further.
So she does an amazing job on the trash, and is a gross muddy mess, but she's happy. And that is a win..she doesn't get "happy" about many things, so when she does it makes me happy.
I hope you enjoyed today's entry, I know it was a bit long :)
I hope all of you reading this are doing well and finding your little bit of happy in each day.
Remember, I'm giving away an amazing book in one of my other posts, I can't wait for someone to take me up on that! Random mail makes me happy...although I generally only get mail when I've bought something. Except Booksgiving. Booksgiving was great. So go grab my book give away...let me booksgive you! This book is amazing pillow fort reading...seriously.
Also, check in with your friends and family and see if they need a little bit of happy in their day as well. Keep going, keep breathing, keep living and keep loving...I do <3
