The weekend
Liz’s mother, Mary arrived safe and sound yesterday. All tolled, it was a fairly busy day. I was supposed to work from 9am to 11am helping support some new hardware at work. So I had some stuff here at home to finish before I could let myself go to work. So I got up bright and early and took care of home-work before going to work-work.
The good news is that halfway to work I got a call saying that everything was quiet and that I wouldn’t have to go in!
So I came home and worked on neatening the house with Liz. It was really just tidying anyway. Around 9:40am I took the kids to Chloe’s first t-ball practice. Some of Liz’s friends from mothers group were there. In fact, the coach is the husband of one of the the mothers group women. The boys played on some rocks with friends from school and Chloe practiced. Grace, of course needed to swing and play on the playground and run across the infield while Chloe’s team was throwing balls across it. *Whew!*
I must have bumped in to at least twenty people I knew. I was very suprised by this. Maybe I should start volunteering with the Little League. We’ll see. We also got the schedule for Ben and Gabriel’s soccer season. It looks like they’ll practice every Monday at 5pm on a field I know floods frequently. I hope that coach “Rock D’Erico” isn’t squeamish about practicing/playing in the mud. With a name like “Rock” he sounds like he won’t mind a little mud. Then they’ll play a game on Saturday or Sunday. My kids make up twenty percent of the team. There are a total of ten kids on the team. This puts some pressure on us to show up regularly! If the Solomons don’t come they could be at a significant disadvantage!
Afterwards we came home and rested a bit and had some lunch. Then I took the kids down the street to the Pine Banks park where there was a rugby tournament going on. The field was OUTSTANDING! I didn’t realize we had such an awesome field so near by. The surface isn’t grass. Its astroturff — but not that hard stuff. Its soft plastic. I always thought that soft plastic blades of grass would lay flat and then it would hurt when you hit the concrete covered by a thin layer of plastic grass. They solved that by adding “rubber dirt” — millions of tiny bits of rubber in between the plastic blades of grass! BRILLIANT!
Anyway, it seemed like a great surface to play on. I’ll probably take the kids down there to play soccer and whatnot.
After about 20 minutes of watching Boston College beat the tar out of U. Mass Lowell we took Gabriel over to another birthday party. When we entered the party a little girl was all dressed to the nines in her birthday dress and she saw Gabriel and exclaimed: “GABIE’S HERE!!”
She called him “Gabie”. And she squealed. I think he’s going to be very popular.
When me and Ben and Chloe got home Mary had arrived, none the worse for wear. Ah well, there’s always next year!
We spent some time catching up with Mary and decided to have an early supper at Appleby’s. Afterwards we took the kids bike-riding — they had to show off for Mom-Mom. Gabriel used his roller blades and showed off his prowess on those while Ben cruised all over the place on his bicycle. Chloe used her regular bike with training wheels while Grace rode around on a scooter.
It was quite a sight!
Nobody got hurt. Despite his objections Gabriel’s pads served him well and saved him from some significant pain several times.
We came home and cleaned the kids up and eveyone started winding down. I tried one of the Guinness draught cans that have the special nitrogen packet inside. It was good. I sat outside in the nice weather and enjoyed a book and some beer.
And it was good.
We spent the evening showign Liz’s mother the “Darling Buds of May” videos we borrowed from Mom and Dad. She really seemed to like them. I think we’ll watch some more of them during her visit. We’ll also watch Monarch of the Glen. She’s seen some of the later episodes, but could never really get involved in the show without knowing the characters. So, we’ll show her the first four to eight episodes and I think she’ll start following it too.
Today is supposed to be even nicer than yesterday. I think we’re going to Marblehead for something. Doesn’t matter. It will be an outstanding day no matter what we do. Tomorrow is the big Boston Marathon. Its supposed ot be eighty-six degrees!
I told Liz that she’d better enjoy spring this weekend because its only going to be two days long this year!
I’d better roll. I’ll write more later.
Sphere: Related Content