Let me start this with the statement that I don't like the spotlight. In fact I operated the spotlight in high school during plays and the Mr. KR pageant. What I DO like is for the things I work on to matter and make a difference. When I create something I don't want a pat on the back for doing it, what I want is for it to be used.

In this area I have been very frustrated lately. When I created my personal site and even this blog I did it solely for myself. I made the website so I could show off my wonderful family any time I wanted, and I created this blog so I could get my thoughts down and release them. I don't care if people read it (else I would use a diary) but that wasn't my goal. With the synagogue though, this is a different matter. I set up and support the website and I created a discussion group for members to come together. As far as I can tell only my family members and one annoying and critical member read the website, and only 2 other people (plus this annoying and critical member) have posted to the discussion group.

I thought the discussion group would be a slam dunk. Most of our members have web access and I tried to put interesting and thought provoking topics on. Even if I failed at the topics, anyone could have created a thread and pulled people in. No one did.

I think the thing that kills more volunteer organizations than lack of funding is the feeling of either being personally unappreciated, or feeling that your efforts are unappreciated.

Monday we started our new session of classes at the YMCA. This session the girls are both taking swim lessons and Rémi has preschool gymnastics and Genie has mommy and me gymnastics. Rémi’s gymnastics class is what you would assume with children having coaches and learning about different pieces of equipment and what you do on them. Genie's class is just chaos in a gymnastics room. They have put lots of toys on the floor mat for the kids to play with and a slide that goes into the foam pit, but there is no instruction or any order. Halfway through the class the kids get in a circle to do some songs and finger plays (for those that don't know, that is things like "where is thumb-kin") and then it is back to chaos. I have signed up to be a parent volunteer in Rémi’s class which is actually a pretty good deal. I just help the coaches keep the kids in some semblance of order and spot them on equipment. In return I get a child-watch voucher for the time I am in Rémi’s class (that means I don't have to pay for Genie to be in child-watch) and another hour of free child-watch I can use whenever. Since I was going to be watching Rémi’s class anyway it is perfect.

I have a new idea for a best-selling novel. Written in first person about a stay-at-home mom who juggles kids, house, and solving mysteries. I definitely think it would sell. I think it would be easy to make it funny, and there are certainly a lot of mysteries involved in motherhood (who put the banana in the toy box last week?). Now I just have to find the time to write it.

Alissa

I previously posted about my misstep in giving Rémi a Cabbage Patch Doll for Christmas. Originally she didn’t even care to look at it until I showed her that it wore its own diaper. Now she is very fond of chastising it for being poopy, taking off the diaper, wiping the doll down all the while commenting on how there is poop everywhere, and then replacing the diaper. She takes great pleasure in this, though this is all she will do with that baby and the rest of her dolls get rocked, sung to, fed, and swung. If I were a fortune teller I don’t think it would be a risky venture to fore-tell her having many children. She loves babies. She loves to look at them, play with them, touch them, and talk about them. She wants to know everything about them. She is just so taken.

Genie’s birthday is just around the corner and I think we are going to get her a trike of her very own. Sadly, because of the rain and cold she won’t be able to really ride it until June, but she really doesn’t need much else. She might need another baby just to even out the ratio between her and Rémi, but she has everything else.

Ralph has been working a lot of late hours, which leaves me eating dinner with the girls alone. Genie has for the most part stopped holding food in her mouth (thankfully) but she is still very picky, and Rémi is working on eating us out of house and home. Just the afternoon she ate a whole peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a piece of string cheese, and two small bowls full of apple sauce. She said she still wanted to eat, but it was nap time and it seemed like a stall tactic