Worn Out with Playing

Friday was busy but fun.

We went to the library for storyhour/book discussion in the morning, and brought along our entries for the gingerbread house contest. There was already a gingerbread house sitting on the counter when we signed ours in, and our little houses looked like aged corrugated metal shacks sitting next to the Biltmore house (as if such a thing would be allowed) beside it. (The house was made by the husband of one of the librarians, an engineer, and she said it was his first effort.) Fortunately there are age categories, so only Ed has to compete with the mansion.

After the library, we headed over to the home of one of our hs book group friends for a birthday party. The guests were all from our Friday hs group, so we knew everyone already, and the weather was gorgeous for grilling hot dogs over a fire and running around.

(This is where the kids were grilling hot dogs and marshmallows. The grown-ups got white bean chili, which I'd never had before and liked.)

(K. is trying to avoid a group hug, and Ed is trying to get her to take part. I know exactly how she feels about this sort of thing, since I am not a group hugger, but I stay out of it in the hope that she will, with Ed's encouragement, wind up more socially adept than her mother.)

(She didn't want to group hug, but K. was very happy to join the girls in running around the pond. She is a good runner.)

Later, we went to a Thanksgiving party at the home of one of K.'s friends. The second party was also nice, but all the moms were young professional types, and there were no dads attending, and the kids were mostly very young. T. and K. started having fun just a little before we were ready to leave, once they and some other children went off the the woods to work on a tree house, and we had a hard time getting them to leave. It was a nice day, but an awful lot of socializing.

(It took a lot of calling to call the kids in from the woods where they were playing happily. I guess all those leaves muffle the sound of my calling.)

Today we worked on tidying the house. T. and K. hadn't been working on their rooms for long before they found fabulous dress-up clothes that they hadn't seen in ages (because they were buried under stuff) that they just had to try on immediately. Cleaning takes a Long Time when you are constantly stopping to play with the lost treasures you unearth. It took all day, but their rooms Do look better, and they had fun.