We pretty much exhausted ourselves this weekend. It was Niska-Day, aka the girls’ favorite holiday after Christmas.
I’ve said before: I love the Niska-Day Parade. It’s such a terrific neighborhood celebration. We love seeing friends and the kids love running wild. I’m always full of neighborhood-love this time of year, with the flowers blooming and the leaves coming out to form tree tunnels over all the streets, and the love hits its peak during the parade.
But by the end of Niska-Day, I am toast, and this year was no exception. M had a tremendous run of some of the Most Fun Ever. On Wednesday, it was a marathon trip to New York City with her school chorus, where they watched Aladdin, which M said was awesome, and ate at the Hard Rock Cafe, which M said was terrible, as well as walking around and touring Radio City Music Hall. On Thursday it was an outing with friends to see Pitch Perfect 2. Then she and her friends cooked up a Fun Marathon for the weekend. On Friday, she hosted a sleepover for a few girls—
–Wait a minute, did you catch that? My daughter invited friends over. I know, right? For those of you who don’t recall, M hardly ever invites anyone over. I’m not sure why. She hasn’t hosted a birthday party since the 4th grade. In fact, Niska-Day is one of the days that I can still manage to get her to invite people over, because it’s the parade and we’re right on the route. So having friends over felt like a major score. They ended up doing a backyard campout, and I bought a ridiculous amount of junk food and everything went fine with no drama. So yay. Anyway. . .
So, the sleepover, followed by Niska-Day shenanigans, followed by (wait for it) another sleepover at a friend’s house and a soccer game on Sunday. M was actually much more pleasant on Sunday than I anticipated, given what must have been quite a bit of exhaustion. Actually, she got a decent amount of sleep because she takes after Cute W, who was always first to fall asleep at any sleepover. When I picked her up, the hosting mom joked that M was her favorite. Anyway, she was a superstar at getting down to work on Sunday afternoon, because she had plenty of homework. Personally, I believe that Niska-Day weekend should be homework-free, but I am not in charge.
Meanwhile, J had several friends over for parade-watching, and then a bunch of them played in our basement playroom. She spent much of the afternoon frolicking at our block party, then headed to the Niska-Day late. I think that next year I’m going to try to plan a little better for her. She’s getting to the age where she wants to be with her friends, but she’s not quite at the point where she plans it all herself, either. So there were some communication/planning snafus. She was also completely exhausted. Between the block party and heading to the carnival I urged her to take a little rest, and she headed down into the playroom to eat some ice cream and lie down. Halfway down the stairs she burst into tears, “Oh, why is it so messy?!?” she wailed. Never mind that it was she and her friends who’d trashed the room. She was almost comically pathetic: so beside herself that she couldn’t eat her ice cream, so she just cried and fell asleep. But later she was rejuvenated and able to go to the fireworks with a friend.
Usually Cute W will take the girls to see the fireworks, but he’s been sick, so after watching the parade, he retreated to the couch.
By nightfall I was ready to join him. Every morning I love Niska-Day, but the truth is that by night-time I hate it just a little bit. It takes a full night’s sleep before I’m ready to look forward to next year again.
