My Weekend

There was a joint birthday party for KT and Kevin on Saturday. Theme was "tiny food" because KT had these tiny plates and bowls and wanted an excuse to use them. Rather than work around Alex's nap schedule, I took Penny down as soon as she was back from her swim lesson and ready to go, and then Matt and Alex followed a couple of hours later. It was a fun party. The kids had lots of fun, we sat around and talked and ate an absurd amount of tiny, adorable food off tiny, adorable plates, with tiny, adorable forks and spoons. (I took pictures of the food, but they didn't turn out very well. But Elizabeth brought these little birds' nests made with wheat pasta and grape tomatoes and mozzarella balls that she'd dolled up to look like little fat chicks that were almost too cute to eat. It was extremely squee. Alex spotted them and thought the mozzarella chicks were Peeps, and then discovered that they... were not. He made the best face ever.)

Also, KT and I made plans to escape for a couple of days, probably Memorial Day weekend, for a writing retreat. We'll be going off-grid -- no internet at all for the duration -- and doing nothing but writing, with breaks to eat and go for walks. The hope is that by being together, we've got someone to bounce ideas off of and also to keep ourselves honest, while still reducing distractions enough to let us really sink into the Zone. I'm pretty excited about it.

Sunday was Matt's and my anniversary. I got him 3 movies (Up, Zombieland, and Inglourious Basterds) and promised to watch them with him sometime. He got me 100 roses, a book, and a food processor. He admitted later to being really nervous about the food processor, because it is in fact the kind of gift that could be taken Badly, but I'd been dropping hints about it. I'd actually started dropping hints before Christmas in the hope my parents would get it for me, in fact, but I'm not remotely disappointed. (I think 100 roses manages to balance out the romance quotient, anyway.)

Our Sunday afternoon plans got a bit jostled. The original plan was: after Alex's nap, I was going to take him to a birthday party for a classmate (whose mother happens to be in my book club), and Matt was going to take Penny out to get a chore-chart reward toy, and then go to the Cube and the park. Well, Alex conked hard, and then Penny snuggled up to me on the couch and promptly fell asleep on my arm, and both of them woke up around 3:30, by which point we'd missed the birthday party and there wasn't going to be time to go to the park. So we all packed up and went to the Cube, and then went over to the Yankee Candle store so Penny could pick out a toy. We were there for a while, as Penny managed to work herself up into tears over having to choose between her two favorites. In the meantime, I talked myself into buying this neckless flamingo. (It was sort of inspired by my having failed to acquire the buffagiraffe to go with my buffalocerous and the buffalion, Many Years Ago. And now that I look at the website for these toys, I see they have also have a neckless giraffe, and it is squee.)

And now I'm back at work and wishing I wasn't, because as much fun as the weekend was, it was entirely too short.

Alex anecdote: Watching Sesame Street has given the boy quite a vocabulary for a 2-year-old. I've mentioned that, right? It's cute to prompt him to say words like "exquisite" and "metamorphosis" just to hear him try to wrap his mouth around them, but we weren't sure if he was actually absorbing the meanings of the words, or just their sounds. But last night in the bath, he ripped off a big fart. Matt, supervising the bath, said something along the lines of, "My goodness! What do we say?" To which Alex promptly responded: "Humongous!"