Weekend Wax Poetic

We had the best kind of holiday weekend I could imagine. We spent the majority of our time outside, cooking, gardening, and working in the yard. I skipped the gym in favor of pulling the baby on long wagon rides. To say it was glorious would be an understatement.

I left work early on Friday, by about an hour, to try and beat some of the traffic. My route home is the basic route southbound out of town, so I knew it would be busy. And of course it was, so I got home at the same time I would have on a normal day leaving on time. My goal was to get all the housework done Friday night so we wouldn’t have to think about it over the weekend, so the kids and I did that while waiting for Hub to get home from work. I fed them, and when Hub came home we ordered calzones, and then we had a fire out back with my BIL and niece. It was the perfect way to kick off the weekend.

We were up early on Saturday, and drove around for a bit after breakfast to find this garden center that we knew existed, but we weren’t sure of the exact name or the exact location. We wanted to go to Wal-Mart anyway to pick up some canvas chairs, so we left and hoped that we were heading in the right direction. As it turned out, the Wal-Mart we were heading to had closed and relocated and reopened as a super center a few miles away. On our way there, we came upon the garden center. It was a pretty fabulous place, and the prices were decent. We got all the vegetables we wanted to plant for around $20 (Hopefully we’ll save at least that much over what we would buy). I’m really excited about it. We let the kids pick some things out that I’m not expecting to grow: cantaloupe(for Liv), pumpkins and corn. We got regular and cherry tomatoes, garlic, sweet onions, carrots, peppers, cucumbers, beans and eggplant. We ate lunch at the hotdog stand that was there, and Hub left us for a few minutes to go pick up a yard of dirt from the back. We did go to Wal-Mart from there and picked up what we were looking for. And once home, we set to work on getting the garden ready.

I was pleasantly surprised with how fast the work went. I was equally surprised and pleased to find that my chives from last year had grown back. Hub built the bed way out from where it was last year since we were planting so much more. By dinner time, we were done in back and after eating, we went out front and started shoveling dirt on to the flower beds. Suffice it to say, we were quite exhausted by bedtime.

Still though, I got up early on Sunday morning and made the kids (oh who am I kidding—we all ate them) cinnamon muffins and we watched CBS Sunday Morning, which is our average Sunday tradition, and I don’t really remember how we spent the rest of the afternoon, save for a wonderful 45 minute nap before heading to Hub’s cousin’s place for a birthday/Memorial Day party. Our 3 children are almost equal in age to her 3 children, and we always have a nice time over there; read: Our Kids Have Entertainment other than Each Other. We left pretty early though, in the way of leaving parties, because Liv was horrendously overtired and had scraped her knees 687 times, and it was just time to get her home and to bed.

And then there was yesterday. We all slept in until nearly 9am, and got right up and out of the house. We stopped and bought the kids donuts and chocolate milk, and Hub and I grabbed Starbucks. Then we headed to our very favorite park, which is about 30 minutes away—though we were deterred by 3 separate parades, which brought the time in the car up to around an hour. It was about 11 when we got there, and not too busy yet. What we forgot though, was the veterans park that resides inside this park, and there were at least 500 motorcycles lined up on either side of the road and tons of people converged on the memorial. We turned around and hightailed it out of there. We stopped at the creek on the way out and the kids strapped on their water shoes and had a fantastic time. Liv enjoyed it as well, so long as I was right in the water with her. I got myself a pretty good sunburn being in the water, but it was worth it to spend the time with the kids. We spent about an hour, did some shopping and bought the kids a sprinkler on the way home, and then we were done. Hub did a little more work in the garden and I camped out in a chair on the front lawn while Bud and Lucy ran through the sprinkler. The weather had been great all weekend, and by dinner time, storms loomed in the distance. We had thick steaks, baked potatoes and roasted broccoli from the grill, but ate in the living room in front of the TV instead of outside. All 3 kids were in bed before 8, and Hub and I followed soon after.

It was ridiculously hard to get back to reality today; it was such a lovely 3 days. 4-day work weeks are nice though, and before we know it, the weekend (full of plans) will be here again. I can tell you this though: I’m now totally jonesing for a real vacation. It can’t come soon enough!