Nov. 26, 2007 at 10:29am

Turkey and cardio and climbing, oh my!

staying sane on a long weekend

Rolling into a long, food&drink -centered weekend, I was apprehensive.

I have a high-energy kid, an atheist mother-in-law who invited my Christian mother to dinner under the strict rule "no praying at my table" and a diet I was trying to adhere to.  To add to that, I invited a 12 year old cousin to stay the weekend, thinking that might help to entertain my squirrelly not-quite-6 year old. 

What I expected to be awkward, wasn't. Dinner went fine, food was good, conversation flowed like the spirits served with supper. Where I expected myself to overdo it, I didn't.  However, the twelve year old was at that age where it's cool to be surly, and spent her time in our household texting her girlfriends, leaving dirty clothes, CDs, and other various and sundry crap everywhere, and in general making me realize that it's not just 5 year-olds who can't ask questions in a full sentence or display gratitude-- apparently this is a skill that's refined as kids age.

I had come up with a plan of attack to keep kids occupied-- climbing gym, movie, craft item, -- after which the mother-in-law would take the kids to Zoolights while I visited the Nutcracker in Seattle with a girlfriend.

Edgeworks was fun for the girls-- my little gal rocked my world with her feats of fearlessness, though the cousin spent a pretty impressive amount of time with her arms crossed expressing boredom (she's not accustomed to height restrictions when she climbs).  The movie Enchanted was fun for the girls; while not, strictly speaking, film at its most intellectually pure, it was a happily-ever-after romp through fairytale fantasy.  Time spent at Artco was an exercise in how not to strangle two "I want I want I want" monsters-- even after $27 spent at the climbing gym (for about an hour of bouldering) and well more than that at the theatre, the kids acted like I was a heinous beast depriving them of all and any fun when I said "no" to most requests for crappy crappy crafty stuff that would end up in the waste bin

By this point, I needed wine but I had to restrain myself for a trip into Seattle for the Nutcracker opening. Annoyingly, the couple seated in front of my girlfriend and me had no sense of etiquette (the dude kept leaning in to whisper loudly, while the girl would giggle) adn then the little dude behind me kept kicking my seat.  All this, while an audience seemingly in need of inordinate amounts of Ricola coughed all around us.  There was some magic lacking, there.

Fortunately, annoying pre-teen went home, "bored" with us (apparently even Zoolights wasn't enough to get her to go "nice!" or "thanks!"), and then our little family could be back to normal-- me, cleaning, him, watching football.  The next day contained more of the same, with a post- Thanksgiving cardio guilt-fest that threw over 90 minutes of cardio at the Y into the day's activities, followed by a trip to Duke's for a well-deserved steak salad. 

And now, I have the holidays to look forward to... Maybe there's a book somewhere about "how to pace yourself"?