Family Bonding Weekend

With our weekend only half done, I have to say how much I (still) like everyone in our family.



Saturday morning is our clean-up morning. For a few hours, everything is nice and neat, then we start living in the rooms again and it's all a mess. But for those few hours, it's really quite nice, and the kids are easy to prod into doing their jobs, what with the reinstituted chore charts and accompanying allowances. Some families don't attach money to family duties, but the fact is that the kids do the work whether we pay them or not, and with birthdays and Christmas coming up we all want to feel we're earning the spending cash to purchase little surprises. With the chore charts, they are much happier picking up dirty clothes and encouraging each other to finish their job list quickly and efficiently. It works for us.
The rest of the day and weekend has been spent playing "Settlers of Catan," tennis on both Saturday and Sunday, family effort omelettes Sunday morning, late lunch/early dinner at Cappucino on Sunday, creating a catnip mouse toy on Sunday, talking with grandma and grandpa via Skype, writing letters to family and friends, and an assortment of movies, books and videogames sprinkled about.
The catnip mouse was easy enough. We have the weed growing everywhere so the kids gathered up handfuls and we proceeded to wash the roots, snip them into bits then pack a little sock full. Draw a cute face, attach a twine tail and you have a toy fit for a cat. All that's missing is a jingle bell inside. Rebecca has a wonderful craft project book we'd like to dive into, just waiting for all the supplies to show up.
As for tennis, both Nicholas and Rebecca are taking lessons twice a week and both are progressing nicely. There is still a lot of ball chasing going on, but each time there's more back and forth action too. Jonathon would like to take lessons, but at 5 years old he doesn't have the focus to stay on task for an hour at a time in a group lesson. So we play on the weekends and I realized he's as tall as the net and the racket is 2/3 of his body length. It's impressive he gets the ball over at all.
OK, I have a headache now and the tylenol isn't touching it. So I'm off to take some Motrin and go to bed. Next weekend we take off on our week long trip to the north and I hope to return with loads of photos and a nice long journal. Until then, it's more of the same from here. Painters arrive tomorrow to brighten up our rooms and the kids have 2 more days at home. Here's to long weekends.