Another heartbreakingly beautiful weekend. I spent it in the usual ways: cleaning, chipping away at projects, watching sports, and snatching moments when I can for reading. I maybe spent more time at the latter than usual, doing a little comfort reading (Room), but I did manage to show up here:

Sports are fun, but it's really about the snacks

Where we ran into more old acquaintances--we knew two girls on the opposite team, plus the coach. The whole Kidsport craziness--the endless idyllic days dragging out endless folding chairs and applying endless rounds of sunscreen and cheering, endlessly, for the team that either wins or doesn't win, broken only by the perhaps-longer-than-necessary trips to the bathroom or the car or escpaing, hooky-like, to the nearest coffeeshop--is made marginally better by the social aspect.

Still a little uncertain about actual game play

It's still kind of tiring. On Sunday I didn't even try to drag Helen to Si's early game, the one that started at 8:30. Instead we biked over to the local kid triathalon, in which two of her friends were competing and which struck her fancy enough (I think it was the medals) for her to get sulky and grumpy and want to leave because "I wanted to do the race. Why didn't you sign me up, Mommy? You're MEAN." So: next year, triathalon. Then we came home and cleaned. That is, I cleaned, and took comfort-reading breaks, and Helen spent 2.5 hours closed up in her room administering spelling tests to her stuffed animals. They all did very well, although I think there was a little grade inflation at work, because even Carrots, who got an A+++, spelled animal wrong, and no one did worse than a B+ despite some test-takers having long lists of meticulously misspelled words.

It will surprise no one if she becomes a teacher

Sometimes it feels a little like we live in separate families--the baseball family and the everything else family--so in the afternoon we roused ourselves and went over to Si's second game. The social aspects of that crowd are less congenial, now that we're on a new team and only know a handful of other parents.

It was a quiet weekend. The rest of our time was spent packing for Si's week of Outdoor Education with his school--his whole class will be spending three days up in the mountains, playing trust games and orienteering and who knows what else. Si is up to his ears in excitement, mostly at the opportunity to pack (like me, he loves packing a list of supplies) and also about the bus ride.