Fevers and Towers and Pumpkins, oh my.

I am supposed to be helping Riley clean the playroom right now. There are two things wrong with this picture, and these are the two biggest reasons that I am blogging instead: 1) I had NOTHING to do with that mess- I never do- yet I always clean it. I don't care if that's part of being a parent, I don't feel like doing that right now. It's my weekend too- and 2) Riley's version of helping is a little skewed. For example, right now he is kicking off the cleaning by wandering around the room playing with everything he comes across and singing a song that he made up that consists of the word "Sorting" repeated over and over at different octaves.

This was a three day weekend, but I'll tell you right off the bat that I'VE BEEN CHEATED! Because the sickness that's been plaguing my household and dodging me finally lost the fight on Friday and I WON! I won a fever, a sore throat, muscle aches, a massive headache, the whole she-bang! It was like a lottery on opposite day. So I spent my bi-weekly off-Friday writhing on the couch, covered with goosebumps despite the thermostat being set to 75 and being wrapped in fleece, while my kids got away with murder because I lacked the energy it required to stop them from doing things they shouldn't. Luckily, my fever was gone by that evening, because I had promised Riley that I'd take he and Zoey on a picnic on Saturday.

And so I did! It was absolutely beautiful outside, so we packed up some stuff and went to Jim Barnett Park to eat lunch, which was immediately the furthest thing from Riley's mind.

What is so great now that he's started school is that his social walls are down. He's always been fairly outgoing, don't get me wrong, but he's never really been too confident in his ability to make friends. Now, he is. Okay, never mind. He's the same, I'm different because I'm not as worried about his ability to make friends. I admit it. Anyway, he takes off and collects names and digits and is never heard from again until he needs some apple juice or gets stuck in a tower.

He did get stuck in a tower. Zoey and I were chilling in the shade on a blanket and I hear Riley yelling. It's amazing how even when surrounded by 10,000 children, you can hone in on your kids voice- pick it right out from the other 40+ kids screaming "Mom!" simultaneously. I was able to trace his cries to the tower:

Seriously, what is up with the bar at the bottom of my pictures? Annoying.

I yelled back to Riley that if he needed to talk to me, he needed to come down to me and talk. Time passed. Zoey and I read a book, ate some grass that probably a dog had peed on, shared some goldfish crackers, and talked to admirers.

Then some little girl runs up and asks me if I'm "Rowley's Mom"? To which I reply "Uhmm, I guess." since I'm actually Riley's mom, not Rowley's, and I am not sure I want to take accountability for anyone else's child on accident. She then explains that she's been sent to deliver the message that my son is stuck in the tower and cannot get down. So Zoey and I leave our home base and head over to the tower, where I spend a good ten minutes convincing Riley it's okay to go down the huge slide and that I can't climb up there because I have the baby in my arms. I kept looking around to see which kids I'd need to kick in the shins for laughing at my son, but the other children were surprisingly empathetic and patient about it. Several tried to demonstrate how safe the slide was, or tried to suggest alternative methods of getting down. Finally, he came down the slide, and I made him come sit with Zee and I until he could calm down. Afterwards, he slid down at least five more times, and made that tower his bitch.

And then on the way out, he made out with the water fountain. I didn't realize it until I looked at the picture later.

A dog probably peed on that, too.

Today we went to get pumpkins. It wasn't a fun time. It was too hot, the food was expensive and awful, we had committed a huge parenting foul by forgetting the stroller and were doomed to pass Zoey back and forth, and the selection of pumpkins was fair at best. But Riley enjoyed going down the huge slide over and over:

Oh, and I almost forgot! On the way home, while I was taking a sip of my ridiculously expensive can of coke, something tried to enter my mouth from the coke can that was not soda. It was quite obviously a bug of significant mass, so I spit all my coke back into the can (and on my pants) and then acted like I was dying for a while, allowing Russell to poke fun at me. I assumed it was a stink bug, because we saw a trillion of them. When we got home I dumped the coke out on the driveway- IT WAS A BEE. I pointed at it and yelled "You wanna make fun of me now?" to Russell, 'cause he's scared to death of bees, but he mumbled something about how it probably was dead already and couldn't have stung me. Whatevs. He would've shat his pants if it'd been him.

So as another weekend comes to a close (Noooooooooooooooooo. So cheated! I want my Friday back!) I am happy to have spent some mostly quality time with my kids. I would do the trip to the park a million times over- maybe sans the tower incident- but now all I can do is go help my son "clean" the playroom.