Weekend in Review

So, it was a surprisingly busy and productive weekend with me and Connor. Two bachelors/roommates living life to the fullest. Or, at least, hanging out and being guys anyway. Saturday he had a basketball game in which he scored three times. And that's pretty good considering he's been playing with the 1st graders, even though he's just a kindergartner. His team really dominated the other team actually. Not that they really keep track of such petty things as the score. But the kids tend to. They notice. The score was something like 26-6, I think. He was proud of himself. Then in the afternoon he had a play date at a park with his little girlfriend from school, in which he also got to give her his Valentine's Day card and a large Hershey's Kiss. I may have helped somewhat with the procurement of those items...

Kids are funny at this age (6). They run around and play, and then get distracted and play with other people or by themselves, and then at one point or another get sad because their play date isn't giving them quite enough direct attention. And then they come together and run around together some more. And then they sit and share "secrets". Connor said they were saying secrets about me. Probably they were making fun of me. That's what I would do if I was that age. That's what most kids do, isn't it? "His hair is gray like my grandmother's". And things like that. Kids tend to point out the obvious. But in the end they spent a couple of hours there playing together at the park. Playing tag, playing on the swings, playing on the monkey bars, and so on. They ran out a lot of their energy in those two hours. Which, frankly, is always a good thing from a parent's perspective.

Sunday we got a lot of chores done at home, including washing the car, pulling some weeds from the back patio, cleaning the toilets, and putting all of toys and other miscellaneous things away where they belong. Connor made it into a sort of game by saying that it was our cat Buster that was telling us what chores we had to do and when. I also got a little bit of time while he was on a "break" to go through some of the files in my file cabinet and office desk, and clean out and shred or throw away a bunch of stuff that's old and no longer needed. There were some things I found that I hadn't seen in nearly 10 years. Why do we hang onto this stuff? I tried to be pretty liberal in just tossing stuff that I would probably never again use anyway. Sometimes it's tough to let go of "stuff". In any case, I'm slowly but surely whittling down the amount of stuff I'll eventually need to move.

In between all of that Connor got to practice riding a bike, which he has not really had too much experience with till now. At least, not without training wheels anyway. He did good though, and rode all by himself for some significant stretches of sidewalk. At least, until the sidewalk turned. That inevitably lead to a bail out and/or crash, and a bit of whining because the bike doesn't do what it's supposed to, apparently. It's always the bike's fault. But he's excited about trying again, which is a good thing. And this morning he was going on and on about how he didn't realize that the balance was so important and that you can't turn the handlebars too much too quickly. So I guess the bike has been cleared of its transgressions. Parenting win, I suppose.

Then after dinner we cuddled up on the couch and Connor watched his favorite YouTube celebrities doing their thing. I baked some chocolate chip cookies from some store bought dough. And the sun slowly settled and the clock wound on, and before I knew it, it was bed time. The weekend was done, the work week getting ready to show its ugly face once again. And that, pretty much, is my weekend in review.