Working for the Weekend

This past Saturday was one of the busiest in recent memory. We started out at 8am at the gym for the Fitness Fair. Essentially, they were offering free sessions of their pay services, so Liz and I stupidly signed up for BOTH a one hour workout with a personal trainer AND a one hour running class, back to back. Liz's trainer mostly tried to sell her on hiring him (and flirted with her a little, I'm sure), while mine mostly punished me as much as he could. After the first 15 minutes or so I started paying close attention to how much he would let me rest in between lifts, and it was never more than 60 seconds. Liz had lower back spasms the rest of the morning from all the ab stuff she was doing. Needless to say, we both felt the effects for the rest of the day. Below you will see why this was such a bad idea.

The best part of the day was lunchtime, when our good friends from Wharton, The Stanworths, came to visit. They were in San Antonio for a weekend of Sea World, the Riverwalk, and shopping at the best outlets I've ever been to, in San Marcos. We were delighted to have them and their adorable girls over for lunch and glad they took time out of their schedule to stop by. The boys had a lot of fun with Savannah and baby Kate and we enjoyed reminiscing with Marc and Jenn about the good old days in Philly.

After the Stanworths left we readied ourselves for my 9-year-old Sunday School class party. No less than eleven 9-year-olds came over for two hours of complete mayhem. I thought it would be a good idea to let the kids set the menu, so we let everyone choose one thing to eat. Well, the joke was on me, because we ended up having sushi, shrimp, octopus (I think that one was a joke, but I made the poor kid eat it anyway--that'll teach him), chocolate cake, honey-roasted peanuts (random, I know, but that's exactly what she wanted), strawberries, barbecued chicken, pizza, and root beer floats.

The kids played outside in the backyard for a while. We even had a five-on-one basketball game, with me versus five little girls. Needless to say, I smoked them 5-1 and had about 23 blocks. They pretty much just stood right next to each other and squealed while they handed the ball back and forth 20 feet from the basket.

We also had a PS2 SSX Tricky tournament that the kids were excited about. But the funniest part of all of this is how much Charles and Joey insisted on being in the mix at every step. The funniest/saddest part was while two of the kids were playing PS2 and Charles was loudly coaching them and getting more and more excited as the kids neared a difficult part of the course. His advice went something like this: "no... turn... no wait... turn to the left... NO... you have to TURN... the river is COMING... jump over THAT HILL AND TURN... NO... NOOOOOO... (SIGH) NO NO NO NO NO You have to JUMP over that HILL and TURN or you'll fall in the RIVER!!! YOU HAVE TO JUMP NOW OR YOU'LL DIE IN THE RIVER!!!! JUMPJUMPJUMPJUMP!!!!!!!!!!!!!" At that point, one of the kids that was trying to play finally snapped and said, "just SHUT UP!" Those words are very against the rules in our house, plus as a parent you always have a protective streak that makes you want to go and pop the brat that tells your sweet 5-year old to shut up (plus, the kid didn't turn at ALL, I mean, how hard IS IT?). But before Liz could do anything, Charles, who had walked all the way up to the TV during his tirade, spun around, looked at the whole room of 9-year-olds, and indignantly declared in a very strong voice, "YOUUUU don't say that to MEEE!"

For yet another dessert and as part of the "craft" activity they requested, we made sugar cookies for them to decorate with frosting and sprinkles. Once all the kids got out of the way, Joey stole away to the table with the cookies, frosting, and blue sprinkles. He didn't do a bad job with the frosting (I expected him to just eat it straight), but he must have shook those sprinkles for five minutes, because he used the rest of the container on his cookies. I walked up on him happily eating away and snapped these pics.



He actually lost interest after only about half a cookie. Our kids rarely get a lot of sugar, so maybe he was grossed out by all of it (think butter cream frosting). Liz has us eating very healthily and, although they get their little treats from time to time, they rarely eat HFCS-filled stuff. So, this seems like as good a time as any to also post this picture from a few weeks ago when Joey was given a popsicle treat (that he talked about for a few days). You can see he is really enjoying it.

And as long as we're posting pics, here are a few of our sweet girl Tori.
She is increasingly mobile every day and has shown a startling ability to pick up new tricks very quickly. She's already pretty much mastered scooting/crawling, and before we know it she'll be running along side her brothers. Poor Liz.