Weekend Update

The girls' school had a weather day built into the calendar but had not been used (because of our total lack of winter), and therefore, we had a three day weekend. Instead of celebrating, we kicked off the project of staining the deck again. Since time is limited, we are attacking it a couple of hours at a time, and the project is ongoing.

So Friday afternoon we moved all of the deck furniture, and Skip cleaned the deck. We (and by "we" I mean he) had to wrap it up quickly because we had to turn in early to have everyone ready to run a 5K the next morning. We arrived at the 5K at 6:10am, finished registering and got the girls ready to run. We have no idea where they got the aptitude for running (actually we do... my dad, although a big guy, was quite fast in his high school days)(they just didn't get it from us!), but they were so awesome! Lauren finished in 28:44, and Gracie was clocked in at 29:26. (I had her time wrong... her recorded time is 29:26.) The official results are not broken down by age, but out of all the female runners (82 in total), Lauren and Grace finished 17th and 20th, respectively. They were definitely amongst the youngest runners, and we could not be more proud.

William George desperately wanted to run as well, and we will try him on the one mile "fun run" next year. However, he did get to suit up for team Braves right after lunch. He had some great "at bats" and made some good defensive plays as well.

After the game, we visited with Grammie, who had joined us to watch George play, and then had dinner.

Lauren and Grace served as acolytes again Sunday and after church we took lunch over to Skip's parents. Poppa is continuing to recover steadily, and we enjoyed getting to visit with them. After a brief visit (don't want to wear him out), we came home to work on the deck. While we enjoy having a large deck, we do not enjoy staining such a large deck, but since it's difficult to find someone who will do the job right, we got out our paint brushes, Skip tuned in to "Prince DNA" on whatever his latest streaming experiment is and we got busy. (I told you there would be nonstop Prince over the weekend. I had previously scrubbed all Prince material from our devices due to the... uhm... non-family friendly lyrics -- especially since George kept landing on DMSR.)

But so we worked on the deck until dark, and then we called it a day.

As stated, the girls were out of school yesterday, and we took the opportunity to go to the Botanical Gardens to take dance photos. Although William George's school was open, he and his father conned me into letting him stay home, too, and he promised to be on his best behavior. I think you can guess how that turned out. Grammie had agreed to accompany us to wrangle George (the woman is a saint), and she had a quick dermatological appointment after the shoot. In the lobby of the office building of said physician, George spontaneously developed an elevator phobia and refused to go inside the elevator. Instead, he dropped to the floor screaming and, per the girls, "embarrassing everyone". So the trio and I waited in the lobby while Grammie had her appointment in peace. Unfortunately, it was one of those days that I'm sure we will laugh about in retrospect.

When the "enjoy every moment" discussions were going on a few years ago, mom and I debated that at length. Now when something amiss occurs, she learns over and whispers confidentially, "You won't necessarily miss that." Ha!

But anyway... we recovered, had lunch, mercifully returned Grammie to her quiet home and called it a weekend.