The Weekend

To try and differentiate this post from the last, I'll forgo the bullets. But fear not, this is still just a random collection of thoughts. One of these days I may get back to blogging in a format less suited for facebook status updates. Or not.

This weekend was the elder boy's T-ball parent's meeting. The kids were invited "so they could meet each other". There wasn't a whole lot of meeting going on though - everyone sat with their parents and the coach never even had us introduce ourselves. That said, I like the coach (and really, I wouldn't have mentioned the other if he hadn't made such a big deal in the email about how everyone would get to know everyone else as the primary purpose of the meeting). His philosophy on T-ball is that it's for the purpose of fun and that there is no yelling. This is very much in line with Tim's and my philosophy, so that's nice. We got his uniform, which seems excessively large, but it's what they had (the coach was annoyed at the sizes we were given as well), and we'll make it work. After the meeting, we headed to the store to get a glove, bat, and tennis balls for practice. The coach suggested tennis balls as they don't hurt when they hit you. Always a good idea not to foster fear of the ball.

From there, we stopped by Lowes to get a few various things (new sprinkler head, fertilizer, so forth). We were doing great until the check-out line. At that point, everyone in the world apparently decided to check out and so whereas before we were well on our way to being on time for lunch with Tim's family, that last stop, along with Saturday traffic, conspired to make us a little late. I was the only one who even noticed though, as Tim's family runs on Sleepy time (which is universally 10-15 minutes behind any sort of actual time-keeping mechanism.)

Lunch was nice. It was to celebrate Tim's sister's birthday. We went from the restaurant to their house to partake of Georgetown Cupcakes that I had delivered to her. (She loves the show and wanted to taste their wares.) I have to say...I wasn't over the moon. There is too much icing and it's too cream-cheesy. And the cupcakes themselves are more like mini-pound cakes than a cupcake. (Not light and fluffy...very very dense.) All told, I found them too rich, too sweet, too firm, and much too expensive. But hey, now we've done it once, I can say I've done it, and I will go back to Betty Crocker when I want a cupcake.

My father-in-law had to make 3 different comments that summed up to his concern that kiddo the younger is "fat". He's 7 weeks old. He has chubby cheeks. Healthy babies who are not failing to thrive do tend to have chubby cheeks. I could have throttled him. I managed (barely) to hold my tongue and say nothing. Poor Tim got an ear-full though.

At that point, we were all so beat that we bailed on the plans we had tentatively made with friends for dinner (plus, we had lunch at like 2, so really dinner at 5 wasn't going to need to happen anyway.)

On Sunday, the ladies in our Sunday school class met to see The Hunger Games. I liked the book (though I didn't love it, nor am I one of the clamoring fans) and was curious to see the movie - though again, I could just as happily waited for DVD. But they all wanted to go (2 of them are clamoring fans), so hey, why not. Overall, I liked the movie. I thought it was very true to the book - though they left out parts that I thought were important - but then, that's always the case with a book to movie adaptation. I did think they handled the violence well - it was not gratuitous, nor was it overt and gory. Most was implied with cut aways or the sound of the cannon (signalling a death) from afar. The one scene that, in the book, is described as a bloodbath was by far the worst of it, and it really wasn't any worse than what you'd see on CSI. That said, I don't think younger kids should see it, and I don't necessarily even think younger kids who've read the book should see it. There's a level of psychological maturity that you really need to have with this one (and honestly, I'd even say to read the book -- if they're not ready to read Lord of the Flies, they're not ready for The Hunger Games.)

Today has been a laid back day of swimming and laundry (wouldn't it be nice to combine the two?!) Both boys are napping and I'm thinking I might actually go lie down myself.