With Aaron out of town for the weekend, I was determined to turn around our series of unfortunate events into something good, and took advantage of the opportunity to just play with my children. On Friday evening, we grabbed Subway and took a picnic to the square for Pickin' on the Square. But when we arrived, the square was so packed with people playing Pokemon Go that we weren't enjoying ourselves, or the music, so we packed back up and headed down the Greeneay trail. We made it all the way to A Street, met a sweet couple who had just become engaged in the trail and took their photo for them, then headed back up. When we reached the backside of the Black Apple tiny house community, we decided to eat by the museum on the sculpture trail, so I carried the stroller down the steps, and we had a perfect picnic between the Pecos Bill and Love sculptures.
After a little exploring, we took that trail back up past the sky space and cut through to the Compton garden trails. We found a cozy spot, put up the hammoks, and I read a chapter of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets to them while Sloane gluttoned herself on a bag of Cheetos in the stroller. Thanks for being good to us, Arkansas.
On Saturday evening, the children wanted to "try a new food" and I decided my once-super-picky eaters were ready to give the greatness of Chinese takeout a try. Quincy was most enthusiastic about this, so she got to go inside Panda Express with me and try some samples. We settled on orange chicken, sweet and sour chicken, chow mein, egg rolls, and white rice.
And then, because I am no dummy, I slipped into Little Caesars and picked up a $5 plain cheese hot and ready pizza.
We watched the new American Girl movie, Lea, from redbox, and had a "try everything smorgasbord" and everyone found a few somethings they liked. Soren fell asleep in my lap.
This is the kind of mom stuff that keeps me fueled, so I can navigate the hard stuff. I despise early mornings, packing lunches, endless hours of homework, 900 emails from the schools, and enforcing the piano practice schedule. None of those things exist in the summer time. It's just me, my people, and places to explore. Sure, we still had a dozen m potty accidents, church commitments, and dentist appointments, to tend to, but I love being mostly in charge of our schedule. Once school starts, the inevitable over scheduling in order to encourage and enrich everyone's individual interests and talents, will quickly start to eat up our free hours and take over our lives. My kids are getting older and there will be less time for us to just be us.
And that's ok, because we'll soak up that "less time" and make it good. There are only 10 days left of summer to savor, and, as usual, I started panicking that I didn't put enough in our tanks to get us to winter break. I'm just not ready for the next season. I don't want to give up summer or the closeness we feel.
I'm really thankful for last weekend, and our hammoks in the woods. It was Premium Quality Top Grade Mom Fuel.
No comments:
Post a Comment