Sunday, December 15, 2013

A Weekend Report

In this week's Tungsten Hippo post, a passage in a zombie story makes me think about humankind's capacity to respond change.

I also added a spam catching module so that I can open the comments on my blog posts at Tungsten Hippo. We'll see how that goes. Next, I need to add a module that lets people identify themselves via OpenID. One step at a time...

And that's all I have this weekend. We had a busy but fun weekend. It started like usual, with gymnastics. Both kids continue to love gymnastics class, and I am impressed with what they can do. Pumpkin is doing handstands and can turn a circle on the rings as well as maneuver impressively on the bars. Petunia can do forward and backward rolls and is getting less and less tentative on the beam and on the trampoline track. It is fun to watch them in class.

After gymnastics, we went to a birthday party for one of Petunia's best friends. It seems strange to talk about a four year old having best friends, but there are three other little girls she is particularly tight with at day care. Just last week, I arrived to pick Petunia up and found that all four of them had climbed onto the dinosaur climbing toy in a line and were laughing uproariously. Both kids had a good time at the party, and I was particularly happy to see Pumpkin do so well even though she was older than all the other kids. Watching her grow up is delighting me lately. There is an entire post to write about that. Maybe I'll write it later this week.

Later in the afternoon, we went to my sister's place for a tree trimming party. The kids had a lot of fun decorating another tree in their signature "local minima" style.

Petunia wanted to visit Santa to put in a personal request for the play campsite and Dora "horsie house" (stable) she wants, so we did that today. It took far too long (what were some of the people doing in there? Telling Santa their life stories???) but the resulting picture is very cute, and Petunia is happy that now Santa knows what to bring. Apparently, she does not trust the letter she wrote. Fair enough. I "delivered" it to my office, and it is now stored along with the letters from earlier years.

We went to see Santa at Seaport Village, which is a touristy shopping spot on the waterfront downtown. We had lunch and a ride on the carousel after seeing Santa, and then came home for quiet time. Or at least the kids did. I went back out to the "regular" mall to finish up some Christmas shopping. There were a couple of items that I needed and couldn't order- the Hanna Anderson tights that Pumpkin wants, for instance, were sold out in her size online, but available in store. I cannot believe how much I spent on tights today, given that we live in such a warm climate. But they are indeed very high quality tights. (Pumpkin likes them because they stay up and don't itch. I point out that the same is true of leggings, but she wants tights.) I was overcome by Christmas cheer and bought them each special tights to wear with their dresses when they go with my sister to see the live action Grinch play at the Old Globe theater next week.

Unfortunately, the longer than expected time to see Santa and the mall shopping trip combined to make it so that we could not go out to see the Parade of Lights, which is a floating parade of decorated boats on the San Diego Bay. I was very bummed by that. I like the parade, and I thought the kids would like it, too. And it was perfect weather for it- we are having beautifully warm weather right now. But the need to buy groceries trumped the desire to see decorated boats, and the kids were pretty tired already. So maybe next year. I bought myself a poinsettia at the grocery store to try to cheer myself up, which sort of worked. I'm feeling like I'm doing a B- job of parenting lately, and the disappointment over the boat parade amplified that. There's more going on there than I want to delve into tonight, though (another possible post for later this week!) so I'll focus on the good things to end:

I sorted and labeled the items I bought for our adopt-a-family this year, and have those gifts ready to deliver tomorrow or Tuesday. We work with the same charity that gets my diaper donations. Going all out for our adopt-a-family is one of my favorite things to do at Christmas.

Mr. Snarky and I also finished up the vast majority of our shopping for our own families tonight, online. Now, we just need to get our cards sent out!

But for now, I'm off to bed. I hope you all had a good weekend, and that I manage to write another post before my weekend links post this week. I miss writing more, but this is such a busy time of year that it can be hard to get the time to sit down and write something coherent.

2 comments:

  1. I am getting a wee bit overwhelmed with Christmas shopping right now. I dislike spending money in general. I wouldn't mind spending it if I felt I'd found the perfect gift for people, but I'm not sure I have. Next year I will think about this in August so I don't feel rushed.

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    1. Our extended families have agreed to only charity donations as "gifts" between adults. So we do one donation for my inlaws, one for my parents, one for my sister in law, and TJ's 90 year old grandma gets a gift card to somewhere local since she worries a lot about money. It has REALLY cut down on last minute shopping stress and makes everyone feel good since they buy what they need anyway and don't NEED our gifts.

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