Peace, Love, and Video Games

So rather than actually finish one of my many unfinished drafts that require thought and reflection (I have a New Year's resolution draft from January 2016 that's just begging to be completed. Crying out, even), I'm going to recap our weekend. Because I have pictures and I don't want to forget the Great Oatmeal Drama of March 2017 and I read Morning Star (book #3 of Red Rising) until waaaay too early this morning before getting up for my Orangetheory workout- marking the millionth time my workout has been saved by OTF's 8-hour advance cancellation rule. By the time I know I'm going to sabotage myself with reading until 3 a.m., I'm 4 hours away from my workout and can't cancel. Also, today was precisely my one-year anniversary for Orangetheory, and who wants to miss that? Not that anyone gave me a present. Unless an endurance workout with 3 miles of running, 80 push-ups, and a 1,000 meter row counts as a present, and since this is Orangetheory, it probably does.

So, the weekend! It began on Friday with a mani/pedi lunch break with a coworker (30% off at the new salon by my spin place!). I hadn't had a manicure in at least a year, probably two, and the technician took one look at my deep cuticles and rough lawyer hands and said "ohhhhh." Oh yes. I sit indoors and type all day and my hands are somehow that bad. My manicure looked amazing and I adored it for the 12 hours it looked that good.

The picture below is 48 hours later, please ignore the giant chip (argh, always), and please focus on the painful, burning, cracked and oozing patch on my top index finger knuckle. What is this??? Google and our pediatrician told me probably eczema. It popped up in January and then went away after much pain, bleeding, and seemingly unhelpful rubbings of cortisone cream and eucerin ointment. I have an appointment with my dermatologist on Wednesday, but until then, I turn to you. Help. It hurts. Even holding a pen is super painful. Do you know how often you bend your top knuckle on your index finger? ALL THE FCUKING TIME. And every time I do, my skin cracks open again. Washing my hands is so painful I have a fierce internal debate about how dirty and germy I am comfortable being. Don't shake my hands right now.

Then, when I got home, I had the brilliant idea to grab my camera and get a few pics of our beloved nanny Tara and the kids. When I made the kids' photo books for Christmas this year, I realized that even though Tara is a near-daily, and definitely essential, part of our life, I didn't have a single picture of her!

And now I do! She and Cora have a particularly tight bond and I absolutely love it.

Then after she left I found this note Claire wrote her in the playroom. As I wrote in this post last year, one of the most wonderful and surprising aspects of being a working parent is the relationships we've built with my kids' caregivers, and I continue to think "it's nothing but good that my kids have had other adults in their lives who they love and trust and who love them in return."

As Cora exclaims when Tara knocks on the door if she comes to babysit at night, "MOM! My Tara is HOME!!!" She really is part of our family.

Saturday began with James heading out to Dallas at 6 a.m. for a swim meet (he's now the all-time 3rd fastest swimmer of the 100 IM in the United States in his age group!) and all the kids getting up an hour early to show me how much they love me. I read YA dystopian novels on the couch while they watched a hotly negotiated TV show (they settled on Ninjago; and by "settled" I mean Landon paid Claire a dollar to watch it and Cora watched Beauty and the Beast on her car ride kindle that I let her get out of storage; when you only have 1 TV and you only get to watch TV on weekend mornings and you have two big siblings... you really miss out on all your age-appropriate TV shows). Then a friend took Claire to her team soccer pictures and the big bro, little sis, and I got ready to head to the game.

It was cold and super windy again, because that's just how soccer rolls, and when I glanced over from watching Claire on the field I saw these two all snuggled up together to keep Cora warm.

Ten minutes later Landon had collected another toddler and was entertaining both with an impromptu puppet show. He would really truly love for us to have 5 more babies. And until we do, he's going to borrow the babies of others.

Claire did great at her game- she remains unsurprisingly aggressive and kinda-surprisingly focused. Her two besties are on the team, so it's exactly as fun as 6-year-old soccer should be.

After the game we went to a pizza place 0.2 miles away from the field that I never knew existed- James even got to meet us there! Then we headed home to the start of 36 straight hours of grey skies and rain and a slow descent into kid-chaos. Claire blessedly played at a friend's house forever. Landon went outside to play with said friend's older sibling and another friend. Yet this was still somehow not enough friendness because by midday Sunday, everyone had been inside too long and they were making each other (and me!) crazy. The girls played pretty adorably together for awhile (Cora's grin below just screams "I'M PLAYING BIG GIRL GAMES WITH MY BIG SISTER!"), but Landon did handstands for 3 hours and got really hungry and tried oatmeal for the first time (I don't know how he missed it for his first 9.5 years) and then ate 3 packets and when he asked for a 4th and I said maybe he should have some fruit instead because I feared for his digestive system, he devolved in less than a minute to yelling "I HATE MY LIFE AND EVERYONE IN THIS HOUSE" and attempting to slam his door but our pier and beam foundation shifts all the time and the door doesn't fit in its frame at the moment so it popped back towards his face instead.

So then James took everyone out on a 7 mile run/bike ride which mellowed Claire out but was not sufficient for Landon so then they played four-square in the rain for a while and THEN we decided we should all talk to each other as little as possible so James pulled out his meager box of childhood belongings and decided today was the day to introduce the kids to his old Super Nintendo.

It worked! It worked and teaching the kids to play Street Fighter 2 Turbo and Super Mariokart was the PERFECT way to end the rainy weekend.

We've never played a video game with the kids before, so they were really blown away by the sweet graphics of the SNES.

Cora and I played puzzles and matching games. It was really lovely. I gave genuinely affection goodnight kisses to everyone at bedtime 30 minutes later.

And that was the weekend! I have to go to bed now (... to read more of Morning Star), but there have been some great book recs on the last post and I always welcome more!