The kid is still in school half days, but only for another week and a bit before the break. Grandma and Grandpa are getting her pretty soon. We’re going to be surrounded by family, celebrating. Warm and cozy.

Christmas is coming and she’s excited.

And she isn’t falling asleep until late and she’s still waking up early and she’s full of energy and bouncing off the walls almost all the time. Sometimes literally. She’s full of questions and demands and nothing keeps her occupied for very long. She wants attention.

I’m exhausted.

A lack of sleep seems to only fuel her. After a full day she can still bounce around her bedroom for hours before finally falling asleep.

I wish I could just pick her up in my arms, give her a bottle and rock her, enveloped by dark and music, so that she can fall asleep peacefully, blissfully, easily.

I know that everything would be easier for her during the day if she had an easier time at night, but I don’t know what steps to take. Every time we create a new routine and we think it’s working we have to start all over again.

Will there ever stop be complications and frustrations with you, little girl?

There is a hill outside the kid’s school that she likes to play on at the end of the day. I always let her have a little while before I get her back in the car to go home, as long as the weather is in our favour. When the snow finally arrived a few bigger kids from the school started bringing out sleds and the kid tried sliding on her bum. She liked it and I know she loves playing outside, so I told her I would talk to Daddy about getting her a sled of her own.

I found a little plastic one for $3 and surprised her with it after school one day and off she went, up and down and up and down for more than an hour, giggling most of the time.

And then one fateful slide down she tumbled and rolled, bum over head and came to a crashing, crying halt.

I paused, watched, heard the crying and ran over.

She looked fine, she was moving around, nothing was broken, nothing was bleeding. All she would say was that she hurt her face. I checked her teeth and looked for a split lip but still didn’t see anything wrong, so I asked if she wanted to go home or keep sledding.

Keep sledding.

It wasn’t until the next day that I noticed she had a bit of a scrape on her cheek. I cleaned it off and put on a bandage and she was totally fine.

On Friday I was on duty at school and several people noticed the small bandage on her cheek and many of them asked her what had happened. I noticed that the more people who showed concern the more proud she seemed to be of her little battle scar. A real injury with a real story behind it.

Lord help us the day this kid gets a cast that can be signed.

Don’t forget to come on over and Like my Facebook page. It’s great, I swear!

And now I have Fastball stuck in my head…

So I went to Toronto for #StrutTour13, which was very interesting and pretty fun. I got to meet a few people that I’ve never met in person before, I got to say hello again to some I have. I took the train down, which allowed me to get some work done, and I stayed overnight in a hotel because there was no train back late enough.

My train the next morning left around 9:30 and I wanted to make sure I could get to Union, find something to eat and get my bearings, so I ended up walking down the street and through the station right around rush hour. I’m a stay at home parent, this is many, many more people than I see in a normal day. In fact, this is many more people than I used to see on my daily commute – this is Toronto at Union Station.

When I’m in a strange place at a busy time it always gets me thinking: What if I am throwing off someone’s day just by being in a place that I’m not usually, taking up a space where there normally isn’t anyone.

What if I got on the subway and sat in someone’s usually seat, or stood in line for coffee ahead of them and delayed them that one minute.

It’s this little effect we can have on the world and not even think about it.

We’ve long had suspicions that the kid may be gifted. She’s always been advanced according to the timelines I’ve found (walking early, full sentences early, advanced fine motor skills).

There are things we’ve seen that make us believe she’s gifted, and we also have the experiences of Joe’s mother to go by – she dealt with Joe after all – and we’ve heard from people outside our family that we might want to look into getting her tested.

This is a process I am both keen to start and terrified of. If we find that she is gifted, we may also discover learning issues that often go along with that, as well as potential social issues, but if we find the right definition of what she is and ways to cope with that, she’ll thrive.

If there’s one thing I want to see, it’s this kid thriving.

Just look at her

She loves school, she loves learning, she loves to impress us and I want to keep all that going.

But the fact is I wasn’t that great at school. I mean, I was when I went and tried and focused, but in high school things went pear-shaped. In Grade 9 and 10 I was on the honour roll, but I didn’t want to be there, I didn’t want to do the work, things got hard that weren’t hard before. I’m not proud of my high school grades and I know I could have done better. (I did end my OAC year with a 92 per cent average, but I was doing two English classes, peer tutoring and a coop, I mean, really).

Same goes for university, lack of focus. (In college I rocked it and was close to the top of my class with two awards under my belt).

I want this kid to have an easier time of it, but I also have high expectations, because she is smart. I don’t want her to have my blips, I want her to have passion all the way through her life.

So we’ll see where we go from here, and I’ll probably document the process since it might be useful for other people.

Every now and again I am reminded just how much like me the kid is, for example when I have to put a bandaid on her knee or when I find a page torn out of a book or this:

The biggest difference between the two of us is that I always tried to hide my crimes or blame my imaginary friend (Mr. Nobody, he lived between our walls) while she will come immediately to tell us about the bad thing she had done.

For example, after her bedtime the other night I was in our room and I heard her at her door:

“Mommy?”

“What is it?”

“I did something not good…

“I did something bad…

“I did something that will make you angry.”

With that I decided I ought to go and take a look, and there I saw her, standing in her doorway wearing her adorable little nightgown and slippers. And then I saw the diamond shape she had drawn on the carpet. In black marker.

I didn’t get angry. I told her to get back in her bed and I fetched the carpet cleaner. And I knew in my mind that it was something I probably had done back in my day, and then denied having done.

This is why my mother laughs at me now.

Some days this kid does things I never imagined my kid doing. Like, for example, she decided to go ahead and hit another kid while they were playing after school.

She’s hit me before, in anger, in the middle of a tantrum. She’s been told it’s not okay, it’s not appropriate and she needs to use her words.

But this, I had not even the beginning of a clue how to deal with this. Really I should have been better prepared, kids hit kids, it happens, but when that other little girl started crying and the kid refused to tell me what had happened I got a sudden sinking feeling. When the other mom came over and told me her daughter’s side of the story I knew it was the truth, especially when my kid covered her ears, which is her tell for ‘I just did something really bad and I don’t want to hear about it.’

And that’s when my stomach fell.

There were tears and screaming as I picked her up and took her to the car, fought her into her buckles and settled myself in to drive.

As we got closer to home she told me the truth, she had hit her, she told me her reasoning, which made it worse: She had wanted to hurt her, because she didn’t want the girl to like her any more.

How am I supposed to respond to any of this? Seriously, I am a dumbfounded Mama on this one.

I apologized to the little girl, I scolded my own, I told her teachers about it in case anything else happened between them, I apologized to the other mother, and we made her apologize.

And when I finally took a step back it all felt like maybe too much. I can’t take any of it back now, but I also feel like there’s a big arrow pointing to my head flashing the words ‘Jumps overboard.’

Jumps, get it? Visual pun.

There’s a new button over there –>

It’s pretty colourful, you can’t miss it. It stems from this post by Toy With Me.

Ending the stigma on mental illnesses is a big thing for me. I have now been dealing with clinical depression for half my life. Sixteen years of ups and downs, sometimes sleeping all day, suicidal thoughts on a few occasions, lots of tears and self-blame and pain.

I’ve talked about here before. I’ve talked about my postpartum depression here before.

Mental illness has been a big part of my life, fighting it has been a focus. It’s been a long, long time.

I use this picture to remind me.

That’s me in a bad place, even with my sweet baby girl with me. I remember what it’s like to feel that bad, and I remember what it’s like to feel better.

And I know that talking about it makes the difference.