Weekend Fun

Another weekend has come and gone.  And goodness were we busy again this weekend.  After I picked up Joshua at school on Friday, I quickly unloaded groceries so that we could pack up and head to State College for a fun night of PSU Hockey.  Ever since they built the new hockey arena on campus, I've been saying to Jason that I wanted to go to a game there.  Apparently he had heard me whining about it long enough and decided to get tickets for us to go.  Originally we had planned for a babysitter and were going to leave the girls behind, thinking they would have little interest in watching a hockey puck bouncing from end to end on the ice.  But I'm glad we opted to bring them along.  First of all, Mara was adorable sitting in the back of the car when she fell asleep on the way to the game.  Sometimes I feel like she is growing so fast that I can almost see it from the beginning of the day to the end of it, but then there are times like this that I just look back, and she still looks like a baby to me.  I should add that our battle with the blasted bink continues.  She is mostly over it during the day, but when she gets into the car or gets really tired, we're on the road to a major meltdown if she doesn't have it.  And so, I cave.  But anyway...

 

We won parents of the year for our focus on nutritious meals for the kids, and let them eat a Happy Meal in the car on the way to State College.  They thought it was great.  I will also confess that this was their second Happy Meal of the week because of our new crazy Wednesday night routine.  That'll make for another blog post, maybe on Wednesday, although I wouldn't hold your breath because last week I didn't eat dinner or even pee until after 9 pm on Wednesday.

The hockey game was so much fun.  The kids did well, aside from the fact that the girls and I spilled two containers of popcorn onto the floor, and Mara lost her beloved bink when she got excited and spit it out and it went at least 5 rows down.  I have done a lot of crazy Mama things, but I was not about to go down and crawl on the floor below a bunch of people's seats to find this missing thing that I am trying desperately to get rid of anyway.  The kids enjoyed the skating, the fast pace of the game, the little mini Blue Band and the antics of the student section.

 

We arrived home around 10:00 on Friday night and all promptly fell into bed.

 

Saturday morning I had the nerve to screw up our whole day's schedule by sleeping in until...wait for it...6:30.  I now declare that it isn't even worth it to sleep extra because we were so fouled up all day with me missing the time that I usually spend getting things going in the house.  And so, we'll be back to 5:00 am wakeups from now on.

 

By noon we were all lined up for Joshua's Upward game, the third of the season.  I absolutely love watching Josh playing basketball.  He absolutely loves it, and whether he's good or bad doesn't even really matter to any of us.  He just exudes happiness while he's playing.  He does a pretty good job on the team, and has made significant progress over the past two seasons.  His team absolutely got obliterated this past week, though.  I believe the score was 21-1 at the half.  The other coach told his kids to ease up in the second half and that's when we got within striking distance.  We still ended up losing the game, but most of the kids left with their hearts in tact after the gracious behavior of that other coach.

 

 

We spent Saturday evening at home-- ate a nice supper together and just spent the evening relaxing at home.  It was a welcome change of pace.  And helped me gear up for Sunday.

 

We were up and rolling early on Sunday morning-- off to church and then to stay for a puppet lunch with Emily and the kids afterwards.  I think we haven't talked for more than 25 seconds in a row in quite some time, and I was so grateful for the time together.  Even with all of the kids.  (Listen, we'll take what we can get these days!)  The kids liked the puppets, and it made it so that we didn't have to rush home to cook lunch for anyone.  So we'll call that a win.

 

 

I rushed home around 2:00 to drop the kids back off with Jason, and then headed back to the church for a special celebration for a friend from church.  She is battling a horrible diagnosis with cancer affecting many different parts of her body, but her faith is stronger than ever.  She said that she wanted to have a big party to celebrate her life, and no less than 500+ people gathered to do just that yesterday afternoon.  There was 2 hours of time of a huge line of people waiting to share special memories that they cherish about her.  I believe I cried 4 bucket fulls of tears in the course of the afternoon-- but the overwhelming feeling that I have after sharing that afternoon with so many people who know her from many different walks of life is that I felt so blessed to be in a room with that much love in it.  It was impossible to leave there feeling anything other than grateful for being one of the many people who have been influenced in a positive way by Cheryl's life and love and her love for God.

 

I walked into the house at supper time, mascara still smudged from the leaking that I was doing during the service.  And the house smelled heavenly!  I had made shepherd's pie to have for supper, and Jason had made a fresh loaf of homemade bread for us to enjoy with it.  I believe the kids were mostly interested in eating the bread, and not so much the shepherd's pie (seeing as how they don't like potatoes in any variety, I'm not sure what I expected).  Jason brought home a bread machine last weekend, and we have really been enjoying it.  I can't say it's doing anything good for my diet, but it surely has tasted delicious.

I fell in bed again last night- literally exhausted.  I had secretly hoped for a snow day today (having Mondays at home the past two weeks to catch up on laundry and the other things that the weekends haven't left much time for has been a real treat), but when the winter weather fizzled a bit, I headed to work happy to begin another week.  I have so much to be grateful for-- not the least of which are weekends like this one, where I got to spend time with the people I love the most.