Weekend Things

Baseball season is here and all bets are off. Everything else has fallen by the wayside--early morning writing sessions and swims, spelling lists, piano practice, real food for dinner--in favor of color-coded schedules and calendars. At the same time, everyone seems to be coming out of hibernation and the season of school celebrations and band concerts and permission slips and fund raisers and pie sales has hit full swing. 

But the total craziness of an obligation almost every night last week (and on one night five) did not stop me from saying yes to a canoe trip on our one free afternoon, Friday. It was the boys' first river trip, and E and Z turned out to be just about the right age to sit still in the canoe and be thrilled by the rapids (E might have been a little too thrilled). No photos, though. While I was willing to lose my kids to a rushing river, not so my camera (kids, after all, dry out).

In the meantime, C has been rebuilding our haphazard garden beds into something neat and tidy.

On Saturday I took M to his first baseball scrimmage of the season, and then to a talent show audition, followed by a snack at the local diner with friends and a Kentucky Derby party at another friend's house. By Sunday, I didn't want to do anything at all. But I assisted E in finishing his Jupiter project. 

Which he turned into an excellent backdrop for Star Wars the Clone Wars Lego battles.

Because he had worked so hard on Jupiter, I gave in to his requests to play with the sill little 1980s video game joystick thingy we acquired somewhere along the way. I am very much anti-video game, and usually send the boys out to play or find something creative to do instead of playing games (to the point where they rarely ask anymore). And every time in the past that the Namco has come out, they've started fighting almost instantly and then it has gone back in the cabinet for another six or twelve months. But this time I could hear them from where I was upstairs, playing and getting along great--taking turns, offering encouragement and condolences, laughing and making jokes. It was a video game miracle, for sure.

Meanwhile, I avoided a great many "should do's" and instead focused on "want-to-do's"--a little reading, a little sewing, a little wandering around in the mud watching flowers bloom and leaves grow.

Which might be the perfect way to spend a Sunday afternoon.