For Memorial Day, I took the girls to the mall where we bought M a dress for a bat mitzvah. Because I’m a #truepatriot.
So, yes, okay: I felt a little guilty. Especially because I was listing off all sorts of parades on KidsOutAndAbout.com and talking about activities that you can do to enhance the meaning of Memorial Day. But in fairness, we’ve done that in the past. We’ve been to parades, crafted tissue paper poppies, brought treats to our veteran neighbor, etc. We have no ancestors residing in the local cemetery whose grave we can spruce up and then take a photo for Facebook. So. . . we took the opportunity to get the girls some shorts.
Actually, it was pretty much an emergency situation, because M reminded me on Sunday night that she had this event coming up on Saturday, so we had to get moving. Shopping is bad enough without having to fit it in with midweek carpooling and such. Crap, come to think of it, we should have gotten the gift at the same time. Dammit. There’s going to be midweek shopping, anyway, isn’t there?
But, anyway, after the shopping excursion, J and I kicked off the summer season with a visit to the Schenectady JCC’s pool, which is open a full two weeks before the town pool, another perk we appreciate. I didn’t actually get into the pool myself, but I was happy to lounge on the chaise, Plus two of J’s friends were there, so she was happily cavorting with them while I chillaxed with their mamas. This was excellent, because after spending the morning shopping, I needed some Serenity Time. Prior to the pool outing, my sweet J was cozying up to me while I tried to cut meat and throw it into a marinade. This is not actually optimal cuddle time, so it became awkward.
Let’s see. . . what else did we do this weekend? Cute W took M to a soccer tournament over Friday and Saturday nights. They loved the soccer and the bonding but came home exhausted. J and I saw both Tomorrowland with a friend and Pitch Perfect 2 as a mother-daughter date. I thought Tomorrowland was more fun than I expected: a little heavy-handed with the I-believe-the-children-are-our-future theme at the end, but with plenty of girl power, so that was excellent. As for Pitch Perfect, I loved the first one, and this one was. . . fine, too. I think my expectations were too high, plus it suffered from putting so funny parts in the trailer. And yes, I know what you’re thinking: she took her 10-year-old to see a PG-13 movie, one with all sorts of innuendo and crudeness–have I lost all my standards? Well, yeah, pretty much. First of all? Hello, second child. When M was little, we had some standards! But also it helped that she had no idea what she was missing. It was also interesting because Tomorrowland’s rated PG, but there was a surprising amount of stressful violence. I think they skated by on the ratings because a lot of the “people” getting shot were supposed to be robots who looked like people, but come on. Meanwhile Pitch Perfect had references that (I hope) flew over J’s head, but also the kind of snarky humor that we’ll see on tv, like when the commentators say ridiculously inappropriate things. So I decided it was fine. M’s in 7th grade and J’s 4th grade, and I feel like once M hit middle school, it hardly feels worth it to try to shelter her from bad words and crudeness, because middle school is basically all bad words and crudeness, with some body odor thrown in. But it does get difficult when I approve something for M and not for J.
Oh! And I did some houseplant maintenance over the weekend, too.
Basically, I’m terrible at taking care of the houseplants. Yet in spite of my neglect, many of them manage to thrive. Not all. But some. Except that those plants that are hardy enough to survive eventually outgrown their planters and/or become unwieldy, and next thing you know I have a major surgical situation on my hands instead of just a little trim. So I really just have to wait until I can move “everybody” outside to take care of them. Far from the image of a serene lady at a lovely little potting station wearing a wide-brimmed hat and tugging on her floral gardening gloves, I am splayed out all over the yard, like so:
If you check out this mess, I had two schefflera plants that I divided into six more reasonably-sized plants (located at 6, 7, 11, & 12 o’clock), one abusively-trimmed basil and a bunch of seeds that I’m hoping to convert into a lovely little rectangular herb planter (at 9 o’clock), a mini plant (at 1 o’clock) that’s outgrown its home and dwarfed its two neighbors that I put into one of Mary’s old pots and have replaced with a new tiny succulent (below), and a spider plant (2 o’clock) that I re-potted on a whim because I happened to have a spare pot, and then when I saw the huge tangle of more-root-than-soil that was in the pot, I kept apologizing to the poor long-suffering thing.
So that was productive! Although, this reminds me, I should water them if I don’t want them to die by day after tomorrow.
I hope that you all had a meaningful/relaxing/fun/productive weekend. . . whichever you were hoping for!
