The Sewing Mom

I will be absent the next couple of days.  My daughter & I are flying back to Chicago to say good-bye to a very dear family friend.  I met this wonderful woman over 10 years ago when we first moved to Illinois.  She had 2 children, both of whom became fast and best friends with my daughter, even though one is a boy!  We had so much in common, we even learned to scrapbook together.  Of course, we also enjoyed putting our blenders to work, especially making frozen margaritas and mud slides.

My dear friend fought and won a battle with breast cancer, completing many treatments and even a double mastectomy.  She had just received her clean bill of health after being cancer free for 5 years when she received devastating news, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor and had cancer throughout her bones.  She was given a very short time to live.  Little did they know who they were dealing with, a woman of courage, commitment and love, not willing to give up without fighting.

My dear friend fought long and hard, surviving to see both of her children enter high school and becoming young adults.  I am so sorry to say, the battle is over, the cancer won.  My dear friend is now pain free and has gone home to Heaven.  It is so rare that, as an adult, we meet someone that we can call our best friend, but she truly was, my best friend.  I will truly miss her.

Here we are, my sisters, my mom and myself, at the International Quilt Festival in Houston a couple of months ago. It was a really great show and we had so much fun! I really should work on some of the projects I bought while we were there, I just haven’t been overly motivated lately. Oh well, I really did enjoy the show and spending time with my family.

A follow up to my post of frustration from yesterday:

My daughter found her missing athletic sweatshirt.  The school security officer had found it laying on the floor in the hallway (right where my daughter had left it) and picked it up.  My daughter found her this morning, asked about it, and the lady had it, thank goodness!

My daughter re-did her Geometry quiz and improved her mid-term grade just in time so that she won’t have to do mandatory tutoring and will still be allowed to play softball for the school, what a relief!

Today was a much better day!

I am sitting here feeling that I must be failing as a mom.  I seem to be unable to teach my 14 year old how to be responsible.  Don’t get me wrong, she is a very good kid, very smart, very creative and very athletic.  I admire her in so many ways.  And yet, she seems so irresponsible.

The 2nd semester of school began 2 1/2 weeks ago.  I sort of let a few things slide during the first semester, attributing some issues to her getting used to being in high school and the fact that she’s taking pre-AP classes that require much more work and studying.  Overall, she did well in school, got mostly A’s with a couple of B’s.  The problem here is that I think she could have done better in a couple of her classes if she’d just stayed on top of assignments and the grades she was receiving.  She tends to ignore everything and wait until it’s too late to do anything about missing assignments or low quiz/test scores.  The school has a policy in place that allows quizzes and tests to be retaken for a better grade anytime a student receives a score below a 70.  She only seems to take advantage of this when I force her to.

I’m sort of rambling, I don’t really want to go into detail here, I’m just frustrated.

You see, she is also playing softball for the school’s JV team.  This is quite an honor to be selected as a Freshman.  It’s also mandatory that she maintain her grades.  We are coming up on midterm this Friday and she has a 72 in her geometry class.  A 72 or below will require that she attend mandatory tutoring twice a week with her geometry teacher per the athletics department policy.  Why does she have a 72?  Because she didn’t turn in an assignment, so got a 0, she failed a quiz and got a 75 on a chapter test.  I have repeatedly talked to her over the last few months about making sure she stays on top of this class (her most difficult) so that she insures she is not missing anything and that she is keeping her grade up.  Did she do this?  NO!

Today, she stayed after school to turn in the missing assignment and to retake the failed quiz which she can now get a maximum of a 70 on.  But, even getting a 70 would significantly increase her overall grade since the quiz counts for 40% of her total grade.  She says the teacher is going to create a new test for anyone that did poorly so they get a 2nd chance.  She said he’s doing this because so many people did poorly on this particular test.  I’m just not sure what the timeline is for that and she needs to make sure her grade is up before Friday.  This is all really stressing me out.

To top it all off, last week, the coaches passed out uniforms and sweats to all the softball players.  She got her gear on Tuesday and on Thursday, she lost the sweatpants.  She left them in the locker room.  They all look alike, so someone probably picked them up thinking they were theirs, but in the mean time, she has none.  Today, I paid the $15 fee so she could get another pair.  This afternoon (after staying after school for geometry), I see that she has posted to her friends on Facebook that she has now lost her athletic sweatshirt!  ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!  I’m going to have to pay another $15 for that.  Apparently this kid thinks I’m made out of money, which trust me, I am not.

I have never grounded her, but I think this may be the weekend that she gets to stay home.  I’m also rethinking how she does her homework (while texting and talking on Facebook).  I think some gadgets are going to have more limited timeframes for use.  I just really need to come up with a better way for her to learn about money.  Any ideas?

Thanks for “listening”.