Back in the Saddle

How does a weekend manage to go by so freaking fast?

We'd meant to go see Up on Saturday, but Alex wound up taking a four hour nap that stretched right into the latest show time we were willing to consider. So we mostly sat around the house doing not much of anything all day Saturday, waiting for Alex to wake up.

Though since we missed the movie, we decided to go to Wasabi for dinner, and that turned out to be great. Alex was in the best of moods (after a four-hour nap, I should think so!) and got several compliments from various passers-by.

And Penny decided that the time was ripe for her to try sushi. Matt was a little dubious, so for her first foray, she had two cucumber rolls and a simple shrimp-on-rice-pillow thing. She tried to bite the first cucumber roll in half and was foiled by the seaweed, but gamely let me put some soy sauce on what was left and tried again, and that did the trick: she was in love. She scarfed down the other cucumber roll, and made many happy "Mmmm!" noises about the shrimp. When she asked for more, I got her another couple of cucumber rolls and a Philly roll, and she ate those with great enthusiasm.

So whoo for expanding culinary breadth! (Now she just needs to practice more with chopsticks.)

That evening, after the kids were in bed, I thought I'd attempt a little writing -- I've got a notion for a rewrite on Willow Bough that I want to explore, and well, with work the way it is, I'm not going to be doing any writing there any time soon. It went better than I expected. I had trouble sinking into it entirely, but I did manage to get out a couple of pages.

Sunday we went over to my parents' to celebrate Sam's birthday. Penny helped me make Sam's favorite cake (pineapple upside-down cake -- with as many maraschino cherries as Penny could squeeze in) and both Penny and Alex were really good at my folks' -- they ran around and got into things and were generally goofballs, but they were happy and more or less well-behaved (within the definition of "well-behaved for Grandma and Grandpa's house" as opposed to "well-behaved for home", at least).

And we sat down to eat, and completely to everyone's surprise, Penny elected to try a pickled okra... and loved it. She ate three more without stopping, and I had to take them away from her until she'd eaten her meat and green beans. And then I went into the kitchen and checked the nutrition facts (like pickled cucumbers, they're low in calories, low in carbs, and high in sodium) and then shrugged and let her finish them off. I guess it was just Penny's week(end) for trying new foods -- I'm proud of her!

But the whole weekend disappeared entirely too quickly. I'm sitting at my desk now, blinking sleepily and wondering what the hell happened.

Probably no entry tomorrow -- I'll be getting up early to take Alex in for his ear tube surgery, and then I'll be keeping him at home for the rest of the day, so time to blog will likely be scarce.