The Small Family     

First and foremost, I want to wish a Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there--of critters two-legged and four-legged! Here in the Small household, Mother’s Day was a three-day extravaganza. Well, sort of. It wasn’t really all Mother’s Day-related, but we did have a fun three days!

We kicked things off Friday evening, by taking Theo to his first Parents’ Survival Night at Little Gym. The PSNs are basically 3.5-hour “classes” for kids at Little Gym, giving parents an opportunity to go out on their own. Kids have to be three years old and potty-trained to attend, and we’ve been looking forward to trying one…well, pretty much since Theo started at Little Gym when he was about 18 months old. I’m pleased to report that he did awesome! Usually I go into his Little Gym class with him, as it’s a “mommy and me” type of thing, so I just told him ahead of time that the PSN was a very special time at Little Gym, because he got to go play with the kids all by himself like a big boy! He thought that was pretty cool, and he didn’t bat an eye when we dropped him off and left.

Chris and I stayed in the near vicinity, in case we got a phone call asking us to come pick up a frantic little boy (he was very short on sleep that day, so we thought by about 8pm he might start to melt down), but no such call ever came. Instead, we had a leisurely three hours of eating sushi and wandering around a local plaza, window-shopping. When we got back to Little Gym to pick Theo up at 9pm, we watched through the window as he happily played with the other kids. They were doing bubbles and playing with hula hoops and all kinds of fun stuff, and he had the biggest smile on his face! I love seeing him like that--it really does my heart good to see what a happy, confident little boy he is!

He seemed happy to see us and told us he had a lot of fun and wanted to go back again sometime! And the two teachers (neither of whom we knew--but apparently Theo warmed right up to them) said he did excellent for his first PSN. One of them sort of grinned and said, “He really likes to push the buttons on the microwave. A LOT.” Ha! Why do I suspect my boy may have gotten told “no” about that several times?!

In addition to gym play, he had a snack and made a craft--a little “I love you” Mother’s Day handprint. So sweet! I think it’s safe to say we’ll be taking advantage of another PSN sometime soon….

We did our big Mother’s Day celebrating on Saturday, since the weather was supposed to be better than Sunday, plus we figured we’d avoid some crowds. We took Grandma Diane and headed out to Sausalito, to the Bay Area Discovery Museum. Theo had lots of fun playing with xylophones, building houses with blocks, installing “window panels” on a house (who knew kids would find that so much fun??), and doing a little urban planning. After playing for a couple of hours, we headed over into San Francisco for a late lunch at the Ferry Building. I had some oysters (of course!) and some delicious shrimp tacos, while Chris and my Mom had cheeseburgers and fries. (Theo ate a banana, two mandarins, and probably far too many French fries!) My Mom treated us to gelato for dessert…yummm! It was a really nice, mellow day--my idea of a perfect Mother’s Day!

We stuck close to home on Sunday. Wacky Tacky (giant indoor play area for kids) had open play, so we let Theo roam around there for 90 minutes or so before heading to our favorite consignment store and then going to lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant.

Pointless story about the Vietnamese restaurant. I’m not sure I’ve ever really eaten Vietnamese food. Although I love Thai food and sushi, I’m not a big Chinese food eater. For that reason, I’ve never tried Vietnamese. I realize it’s quite different from other types of Asian cuisine, but I somehow just get in my head that “I don’t care much for Asian food--sushi and Thai being the exceptions.” Anyway, as part of Chris’s accounting class this semester, he and his fellow group members have to start a small business (theoretically, that is). And Chris’s group decided to start a Vietnamese noodle restaurant in a college town, for which Chris is the night manager. For some reason, I find this quite amusing (as does everyone I tell, actually). I think it’s because the idea of Chris as a Vietnamese-food restaurateur, working nights and serving noodles to stoned college students who’ve been out way too late partying, is just rather absurd. I mean, this is Chris--the man who orders a club sandwich whenever he goes out to eat and who has never partied in his life. And because Chris is rather disgruntled about this project, I’ve been giving him grief for a couple of weeks, teasing him about his noodle venture whenever possible.

But evidently, all this talk of noodles got me hankering for some, because when it came time to choose lunch on Sunday, I decided on a whim that we ought to have Vietnamese noodles. And so we did! Well, I did. Chris ordered fried rice. If they’d had a club sandwich, he probably would’ve ordered that. ;-) Funny thing is, he loved my noodle soup. It was a giant bowl, so after I ate about a third of it and called it quits, he took over and ate more of it, pushing aside his boring fried rice. Ha!! He’s a convert! Maybe he’ll end up having a midlife crisis and going into the Vietnamese noodle business after all.

So that was our weekend. The other fun part of our week was seeing Auntie Lynnie--a rare treat! Uncle Charles starts radiation and chemotherapy on Monday, so we wanted to go visit with him and my sister and their family before he gets to feeling even worse than he already does. It was really good to see them--although a little hard to see Charles, as he’s obviously very uncomfortable. He had his feeding tube put in a few days before, and it’s causing him quite a bit of pain. I hope that will go away soon, since I’m sure radiation and chemo are going to be grueling enough without adding anything else to the mix.

My sister had wanted to give Theo’s birthday presents to him, and he was very excited to get them. One was a cash register with some little McDonald’s items that he can pretend to ring up, and the other was a leaf blower--only instead of leaves, it blows bubbles. Theo wanted to play with it outside yesterday, and he had fun--but I think the ones who really loved it most were the dogs! Zoe in particular was a crazed pug--dying to get the bubbles! I tried to get some pictures of her going after them, but she was moving so fast that they turned out a bit blurry.

Anyway, that about wraps it up. Hope you all had a wonderful Mother’s Day weekend. And please, if you’re inclined, send some good wishes and/or prayers my brother-in-law’s way as he starts chemo and radiation--and my sister’s way as she continues to take care of her family during this difficult time. I’m very hopeful that in three or four months, Charles’s cancer will be eradicated and their lives will settle down, but it’s going to be a long couple of months….