The Not-So-Exciting Veale Family Weekend

“Mama!  I ‘ant duh square ones.”

Maggie announced this to me while I was in the bathroom this morning.  Seriously, if you have a high need for privacy you should never have children.  When I read in the Bible about God knowing your comings and goings and how nothing can serperate you from Him there’s this little voice in the back of my head saying, yeah, God knows lots but I wonder if he has the tracking skill set of a set of toddlers on a mission to get Mom to agree to giving them a fruit snack!

Anyway, Maggie was loaded for bear.  She doesn’t know how to travel light.  Every morning she arrives with her monkey, her polka dot blanket, her purple butterfly blanket and on special days she includes her white fuzzy blanket we got during the scabies cleansing that we call “Bankie-Bank.”  She’s like a slurring hobo doing a flyby.

“What do you want square?  Your toast?  Your cereal?  Your bowl?  What?”  I questioned her.

She stopped.  Her mouth was working but no sound came out while she was processing.  Then: “Jus’ a minute.  I’s thinking ‘bout it... Marshmallow cereal!”

I am still not quite sure what squares were in Lucky Charms, but once I gave it to her she was satisfied and padded away to watch Sid the Science kid learn about immunizations (an episode which sent Mia into raptures, by the way).  I’m assuming she covered herself in her pile of blankets.  

This weekend we did our best to remove ourselves completely from the flow of life and rest.  On Friday night we took the kiddos to the Kiddie Park, an amusement park for little ones here in Bartlesville where all the rides are either $.25 or $.50.  It’s a really neat civic perk for the city.

On Saturday we had an invitation to go to the lake with some friends from the college.  Out we went to Barnsdall and Birch Lake.  We sat at a campsite and visited with the Weaver family, went down to the lake for rides on the tube, and just thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.  They have five girls in their family.  Mr. Weaver is a business professor at the college and Mrs. Weaver is a retired nurse who homeschools all of their children.  They had another couple there, the dad was a judge, so I was on my best behavior, and the mom was actually good friends with The Pioneer Woman.  That may mean nothing to most of you, but I have become a fan of The Pioneer Woman and have secret hopes of actually meeting her one day.  I feel that my world of six degrees of separation is shrinking and I’m so excited.

It was a good day.

I thought I was being pretty successful at the recuperation of mental ease until this morning when I was trying to empty the dishwasher and make toast at the same time and when the toast popped out of the toaster and I wasn’t quite ready my heart started to pound really fast and I got light-headed because, seriously, the pressure to perform buttering the toast as soon as it popped out was just all-consuming.

Yeah.  I have issues.  I just hope that they’re not permanent.

My final bit of information on the not-so-exciting Veale family weekend is that Mikayla had her first meal of rice cereal!  My baby is getting all growed up!

I really would have liked to wait a little longer, but when she went diving for the food going into our mouth and endangered her safety on a regular basis (besides decorating her face with ranch dressing when her flailing arms encountered the cup) we thought maybe she was ready to try solid foods.

It was a success!  She’s a very tidy eater.  Or maybe I’ve just gotten better at spooning food – after all, with three kids I should have acquired some sort of special skill set.  Nah, it’s just Mikayla.

We celebrated by eating dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings.  Hallelujah.