Extended Weekend for Extended Family

Narrative: Family ties and visits.

In-laws are still rather new and enjoyable to me (they also happen to be a large majority of the followers to my blog, hello in-laws). Feel free to insert your own variety of snide joke about in-laws and outlaws here. Mine visited over the weekend, and I learned a good deal from them.

My wife's sister, her husband, and two kids drove the better half of the day to spend the weekend with Becca and I. They arrived Friday after I got off work, and we all sat around our little folding card table for some wonderful soup. James (the 7 year old) quickly identified my xbox and strategically noted that he was proficient in many gaming systems, including my xbox. I hadn't realized until then how violent my games are, only the free arcade games that came with the xbox were age appropriate. I don't value games based solely on the volume of violence and bloodshed, do I? Game creators really don't make many challenging, strategic, interesting, story-based games in the 6+ category. He seemed happy to play Pinata-Land, but he did suggest that I purchase more age appropriate games by the time they return.

The two year old was interesting to watch over the weekend. I found myself constantly paranoid that he was hiding in some dark corner of my house pooping, but that really wasn't a justified fear at all. He had on a diaper. My puppy, Daisy, has no such restraint. His language was perticuarly interesting to me. How could so few words have so many meanings? In our last encounter, my name was distinguished from the other two-syllable words: "Ba-Bo." I have no idea how this was distilled from Robert unless you follow the mental thread that justifies squinting at my name and reading it while holding your nose with one hand and your tongue with the other.

James said that because he is Peter's older brother, he is the authority on Peter's language. He told me that "Ba-Bo" means "Better." I guess that makes me a good uncle by default.

We went to a free mini-carnival at a nearby park, and I threw the frisbee for Echo while the kids played on inflatable buildings and allowed clowns to paint their faces. James and I took apart a remote control car and put it back together (and I did my best to explain basic digital electronics to him in the short spans of attention he graciously lent me).

All good things must come to a close though, and they left Sunday afternoon after we built a fort in the living room with all available blankets in the house. Becca's dad called about then and asked if he could swing by and and spend the night, so my parents-in-law drove several hours to bring us a wooden table and that old TV with the vertical collapse problem.

It's been a good weekend, but I'm still exhausted. All that cleaning before hand. All that fun during. All those failed attempts to fix my TV with vertical collapse. It's time for bed. Goodnight.