The weekend turned out more spontaneously social than we had expected. We had planned to knock off a bunch of house chores, and hopefully get the Christmas lights up, but then social invitations popped up. With it being the long weekend, it felt like we had a luxurious amount of unscheduled time. I think even with the spontaneous gatherings, it felt like a good combination of social, holiday, and house chores.
We did two big “go-through-and-purge”s. With the kids we went through their books and filled a box with books they were no longer reading. I have mixed feelings about owning books. I love having books, and I can remember how each book came into our lives. Who gave them to us, the bookstore I impulsively picked it up, the Little Free Library the baby raided…. But the reality is, even though we make liberal use of the library, books keep coming into our lives, and space is finite, and I’ve been finding it harder and harder to bring hard copies of books into my life permanently.
We have a linen closet in our house that we dubbed “The Library”. Shortly after moving in, we realized that we had more books than towels. And the Husband and I always joked that we wanted a library in our house. There are also various bookshelves scattered throughout the house. The Library is mostly the things we aren’t currently reading. We spent the morning culling the bottom three shelves, namely where the children’s books were, and also going through every book in the kids’ room and in the living room bookshelf. Even still, we only ended up with a small box of books to disperse back to the Little Free Libraries in our area. For some reason, I thought surely there would be more books to go into the donate pile. But books that we hadn’t opened in ages were clung to and declared “keepers.” Well, at least we made enough room for the books that will come in as Christmas gifts, which was kind of the idea anyway.
I also went through the baby’s closet and swapped out the 18 month clothes for 24 month/ 2 T clothes. It’s always bittersweet for me, moving to the next size of baby clothes. I probably put it off way longer than is prudent, until the children are squeezed, sausage-like, into too tight leggings and t-shirts.
When the baby hit 18 months, all I could find were the boy clothes from the 4 year old. I have no idea where all the girl clothes were. Probably passed along? So the baby wore mostly boy marketed clothes. This time, when looking for the 24 month/2T clothes, I found a bin of boy and a bin of girl clothes. The girl clothes had been packed away for the past eight years and unpacking them brought back so many memories. I realized, too, that there were also clothes that I have no memory of. Not sure if I was working much more in those days or what. I have to admit, I love buying girl clothes – they are always so bright and cute and cheerful. I’m sure there’s some kind of gendered expectations there that I’m pushing subconsciously. But, truth – boy clothes are often just… boring and dull. Greys, blues, khakis, stripes.
With a morning and half an afternoon devoted to chores, we spent the rest of Saturday at a friend’s house, celebrating a birthday. It was one of those visits that start as an open ended “Come by and the kids can play while we chat and enjoy some beers” and evolves into “Let’s order dinner.” And five hours later, with bedtime a good half hour in the rear view mirror, we are packing very tired, happy kids into the car.
Sunday morning, we explored a Seneca Creek State Park. We have so many county and national parks near by that this park was not even on my radar, even though it is only thirty minutes away. We met up with a couple of families from my mom’s group for a playground and walk. We started off at a the nature playspace – basically a bunch of logs set up for clambering and jumping. From there it was about a half mile walk along a trail around the lake to a recycled tire playground. Of course the half mile walk took almost an hour, but each kid went at their own pace, exploring sticks and rocks and dirt as they went. The playground was great because there was something for all the kids, including a zipline that kept the nine year old busy. I often think she might be getting too old for playgrounds, which is tricky when the two younger kids do still very much love going. Often when we go to playgrounds, unless she is with a friend, she is great at playing with her younger siblings. It was great, though, that this playground could be engaging for her.
The evening we kicked off holiday movie season with watching Elf and having milk shakes. It was a good holiday weekend.