The Pleasures (and Panics) of (Almost) Grown Children

While we were away for a month, Bella’s car needed to be moved and reparked twice a week or street cleaning, so she worked out a deal with Chad: he’d move the car twice each week and in exchange she would cook dinner for us all. The results have been more than satisfactory.

Wednesday: Bella made Walnut Banana Bread with a recipe she brought home from Starbuck’s.

Thursday: Bella wanders in my room and says, “What’s that site you like for recipes?” and then gets all the ingredients for and cooks a Baked Ziti with Proscuitto and Peas from the Williams-Sonoma site. (She’s not eating pork or beef at the moment, so we used chicken sausage in lieu of prosciutto.)

Friday: Superbowl-style Nachos

Saturday: Cannelloni with Spinach and Pine Nuts and a pensive comment, “I didn’t pick very healthy meals for my three dinners…” (but delicious and creamy!)

Sunday: An hour of driving practice with Bella. It was her first time outside the parking lot of our gated community. I still feel queasy. It took three times around a parking lot for her to get into position to park… into a PULL IN SPOT!

 

My Jetset Girl

The garden courtyard at Crepes & Co where we had brunch. The gardens are always that lush here.

We dropped Bella off at the airport Tuesday night and she flew back to the States all by herself! She arrived at LAX after 9 pm, and then had to turn around and get to John Wayne Airport the next morning by 8 am to fly to NYC with her best friend.

Headed out down the soi an dpassing some construction. Note the tricked out dump truck.

She (and I) were a little concerned because the “direct” flight here had included a 2-hour layover in Tokyo. And although we reboarded the same plane, we still had to disembark and go through security again. Luckily for Bella, the flight home was on Thai International (we purchased the tix through United) and was indeed a direct flight. She has been sending regular text updates (her phone to my computer):

“Im in the car.
The flight was good
It was a direct flight and everyone got their ow tvs with tons of movies
And the food was really good
Salmom and pumpkin ravolio!”

Note that she knows that I would have asked what kinds of meals were served. A foodie like her mom. And then when she got to NYC:

“Hey mom
So we got here last night
Then we walked around times sqaure then had dinner at this really yummy italien restaurant then we walked up to the empire state building it was so pretty at night
Its about 845 on thursday and i think today is our museum day and then billy elloit
Miss you
Bella”

It can't have been easy to have been the only teenager on the trip...

A last gelato at the airport before leaving.

It feels strange to have her gone. She did have a good time with her aunt Sue, and uncles Songbae and Joss, and my parents. Besides all the grilling of her future plans she often got to choose what she wanted to do for the day (Songbae took her to MBK several times!), lots of loving attention, and money slipped into her pocket before she left.

And now who’s going to Hip Hop Abs with Songbae??

 

Bella Brag Moment

Just got Bella’s report card: two A+’s and four A’s. So for a treat we trekked up to Beverly Hills and got our hair done.

While we were there I got to see Yayoi Kasuma’s exhibit at Gagosian, and we all had delicious Thai food afterwards at Baan. Both are worth a visit.

Bella’s first week of summer has begun with a vengeance. Tuesdays and Thursdays she goes to her SAT prep class from 9 am -noon, and then her Art Appreciation class at the local junior college (Saddleback) from 6 pm – 10 pm. Starting next Wednesday, she’ll be volunteering at the Shea Center (horseback riding for kids with disabilities) from 9 am- noon.

In her free time, she’s in advertently begun a small dogsitting business. It started with a friend’s two toy poodles for 2 1/2 weeks and now a neighbor has asked her to do the same when she goes to Hawaii next week. People pay a lot of cash to have their dogs watched! Bella made $480 watching those toy poodles…(granted she did bathe and groom them twice, which was an additional $100)

And let me make it clear, that I’m not the one making Bella’s uber-structured plans this summer. The only thing I’ve organized for her has been three weeks to Thailand when all her classes and volunteering work is through. Although I suspect that she considers accompanying me to Thailand just barely in the realm of vacation, and more in the domain of familial obligation (as she considered going strawberry picking with us last weekend). HER vacation is a weeklong trip to NYC with her best friend: it’s her friend’s 16th birthday gift from her aunt to visit any city in the States and she was allowed to bring along a friend – all expenses paid! That will be fun for her and will surely include a lot of clothes shopping without any babies in tow.

I am encouraging her to take the time to relax though. Her schedule for her junior year sounds pretty brutal: Advanced Placement (AP) Language Composition, Honors Pre-Calculus, AP Psychology, AP Physics, US History and French III. The only way to make that schedule harder would have been to take AP US History, which Bella decided not to do, in view of the fact that she was already taking three AP classes. She even considered taking Pre-Calculus over the summer  (in lieu of going to Thailand!) so she could be in Calculus as a Junior. Luckily, the Calculus teacher advised against it.

Bella had always been an intense and determined girl.

 

A Foot in Both Worlds

Last week I looked at my phone and didn’t recognize the background picture. It looked like a blurred line running up the center of the screen – like somebody had accidentally taken a photo of the table edge.

As I typically do when anything on my phone is changed, I yelled for Bella and asked her if she knew anything about it. She informed me that it was a picture of her forearms pressed together.

As she walked away, she breezily said, “It’s supposed to look like a butt crack.”

Goofy girl. She may look like she’s growing up, but she’s still a kid at heart. We cuddled up and watched Lost last night – and yup, she still needs everything explained to her…

(I still haven’t gotten around to changing the pic – I’m walking around with a representation of a butt crack on my phone! If it were actually an interesting image I might bother to post it, but it’s not.)

 

Still Pretty Good

I’ve been instructed by my daughter not to wear my new eyeglasses around her. Also to act my age not my shoe number.

Otherwise things are hunky dory in Bella land. For a brief period at the end of the semester Bella was pretty convinced that she was going to get a “B+” in Accelerated Trigonometry/Algebra II class, because of a few tests she’d bombed early on. Then for an even briefer time, she was convinced that the extra credit and her full scores in homework were going to pull her grade up. Then she found out her teacher used weighted grading – meaning that homework, only ever counted for 10% of the grade. And then she studied and studied for the final and got a 97%, which pulled her up to an A (91%!).

And then the next day she crashed and burned on her written tennis final, and the A she’d held in Tennis all semester, slid into a B+.

All A’s and one B is still pretty good.

 

Almost All Growned Up

You know that your kid is growing up when after not being able to swallow a pill for the first fifteen years of her life, she comes into the kitchen and asks for her “own bottle of advil” to take to school – like it’s a grown-up right or something. So, we had a little sit down about how to take painkillers responsibly. I mean, she’s had nothing more than cough syrup and a handful of vaccines her entire life and now she wants her OWN bottle of advil.

You know that your kid is growing up when she goes to the mall with her best friend (not you!) to get her ears pierced. That oughtta show you how conservative she is about these things – my friend who was over the other day, noticed the bottle of disinfectant in Bella’s bathroom and asked, “Oh, did Bella get another piercing?” Not only is this Bella’s first piercing, but it is just the conventional ear piercing.

Fingers crossed, but it looks like the worst of the teenage attitude might have been year fourteen. Granted, last week she had me tell her what I had planned for dinner each night for the whole week and then said, “No offense Mom, but we’re not having anything good this week. It all sounds gross.” And then another day, “Mom, leave my room – I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” And about my new MBT shoes, “Mom, are you sure those are supposed to worn in public?”

But these things are said in a mild way that are much easier to deal with than the dramatic furies I was beginning to dread of last year. We still have conversations quite regularly about appropriate ways of talking to people – and she still sometimes gets her phone or computer taken away – but far far less than before.

I am getting nostalgic for her company. I mean, if my own history is any standard, Bella may leave my house for college in two years and never live with me again! My friend Darlene expressed this sentiment well in her post this week; she called it her “only” list and she made a partial list of things that she “only” got to do for a short time in the context of her sixty years.

 

The Light At the End of the Cheer Tunnel

After a rocky start, Bella’s cheer team has done very well, placing not only first in their division at the JAMZ competition, but winning the overall championship with the highest score of the day! That event qualified them for the Las Vegas competition in February.

The WESCON Regional competition last weekend in Long Beach qualified the girls to go to Nationals in Florida. (Bella’s not going to that one – too much school missed…)

Almost done with the cheer season! She might not even do track in the spring, because that would change her schedule around and she likes her Accl. English teacher right now. That means she’s thinking about doing power walking for PE instead (she has tennis right now), so that her schedule won’t change.

As much as I am pushing for her to do track, it would be nice not to have to work the snack bar, come up with the team fees, give rides every day, etc…

Here is a wobbly video of the qualifying WESCON routine. It’s impossible even for Bella to always tell which girl is her even when this video is played on a large screen TV, so don’t ask – I’m not sure which one is her.

 

Kudos to Bella

Bella got the spirit stick this week! This is what the coach said,

“Kudos to Bella for taking home the Spirit Stick on Wednesday! Bella is one of our first time cheerleaders and has worked very hard to catch up to the girls that have been doing this for years. She has done an amazing job – she has awesome motions (VERY sharp), her jumps look great, she’s mastered all the cheers and dances, and she’s even surprised us with some tumbling! Great job Bella – we’re so proud of you!”

And here is a small portion of Bella’s cheer team’s new competition routine.