Sunday, March 19, 2005
We have had a good weekend, and a busy one.
Mother and I have decided to paint the house blue. We finally agreed on a lovely dark blue color that I think will look nice.
We took Alesia to the Botanical Gardens yesterday morning and really enjoyed it. They have wonderful gardens with blooming plants, even this time of year. They have huge greenhouses with artificial climates like a rainforest, a high altitude jungle, etc. lots of birds and frogs and things. My cousin mark and his wife came along, and they are very familiar with the gardens and were excellent guides. Mark took a great photo of Alesia [see new photo] We also bought some beautiful bulbs in the gift shop, including red Canna Lilies, which I love.
We had lunch at an old Atlanta restaurant called The Colonnade. Great southern food, lots of variety. Mark had pickled beets – beets are his favorite dish. There were rutabagas on the menu! We had heard of it for years – Pat Conroy said he took his father there. The only real weird thing was they won’t take credit cards, only cash or a personal check.
We watched Defending Your Life last night, the old Albert Brooks movie. Alesia loved it. She has started actually watching kissing scenes, instead of turning away in embarrassment. That is an alarming development.
Today the highlight was that my friend Maria and her son Perrin came over for lunch, then the children went skating. We just took them down the street to the tennis/pool area, and there were no cars in the parking lot, so the skating was good. Perrin showed Alesia how to stop, and encouraged her to be more confident. He is a wonderful skater and can do all sorts of tricks. He’s also getting to be a very cute boy, although at 13 he’s a “younger man” – LOL. He and Alesia get along well, which is great. He’s very easygoing and polite.
Alesia really made some careless errors on her Kumon assignment tonight. I gave her a lecture about being more careful, and talked about the consequences if she doesn’t do well in school. She’s not learning her English words every day like I have asked her to do, either. [I read a chapter in the Love and Logic book, so I focused on explaining actions and consequences.] I tried to get her to understand that SHE will be the one who suffers if she doesn’t get moving on her language work. I don’t know how much good it did.
I get so discouraged sometimes because I think, what if she never gets the point? What if she only gets to about 10th grade in school and can’t go any farther? I hate the thought of her doing some awful, menial job for the rest of her life.
