Bananas-fun

Let me use one word (OK, a hyphenated-combo word) to describe the last week and a half: bananas-fun.  Bananas because it was Ca-RAZY busy but it WAS ca-razy fun.  My dear friend Katherine was here Saturday-Tuesday last week with her nearly 4 year old pixie-perfect daughter Grace.  Katherine’s hubby Dan is in the Special Forces and while technically not deployed currently he’s in the Middle East for four months training a foreign country’s ‘special forces’ – sounds deployed to me!  Katherine and I have tried, since we became friends 12 years ago, to celebrate our (two days apart) birthdays together as often as possible. 

 

The thing that Katherine and I realized is that what we love most is really just being with each other – we don’t need fancy outings, fancy locations.  Granted, visiting her in Monterey a few years ago what with the beautiful ocean views, the dinner in Carmel with Clint Eastswood (sitting nearby), etc. WERE amazing times and fun memories, but when we reunite, we just want to go for a run and talk…and talk…and talk…and then drink wine and talk…and talk.  So, that’s basically what we did this visit.  We went for a long trail run on Sunday while the girls napped back at the house with Mike and the boys (who weren’t napping, just to clarify).  Our trail run ended up being longer than I’d planned due to the fact that we got completely lost in the labrynth of trails that we can reach from home. Next time maybe I’ll be wise and bring a map. 

 

On Monday, Katherine, Grace and Kayliana came to my preschool music classes.  It was so much fun to have them there and, I was very relieved, as Kayli did great in her first ever music class!  After naps, we put the girls in the double-jogger I borrowed from neighbors and we set out for another run.  I’m an awesome friend and made Katherine push the 90 pound load up all of our massive neighbhorhood hills (and that way, I was actually able to keep up with her). After dinner, Katherine and I plopped the girls in front of a movie and (with Mike watching them as well), went up to the golf course/club for a drink.  Thankfully the weather was perfection.  The views are amazing.  And before we knew it the sounds of a bag piper drifted towards our patio table.  Looking across the rolling hills, with a bag piper playing in the distance, we were able to forget for a moment that we were really just a few blocks from my house.  Tansported to Scotland were we!  Hey, for two moms that don’t get out a whole lot, we can dream, right?

 

Back to reality.  We had to say goodbye to Katherine and Grace the next morning, and we commenced yet another week of baseball madness.  We carried the high of the previous week’s success: Matthew’s first ever homerun!! into the playoff games of last week and this week.  We had baseball Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.  Friday night, we came home to a doubling of the amount of children in this house plus a dog (and Scout our bunny)!  We watched Jason’s & Rebecca’s three kiddos (Joshua – 9, Noah – 6 and Veronica -2) plus doggie Kahlua while they presented on their last Engaged Encounter retreat.  Miraculously the kids all did seriously awesome and had no major issues!  We even managed to take all six with us to the end-of-the-season baseball party on Saturday night and to Mass on Sunday morning!  Sunday afternoon, we ripped through the house cleaning it up for a surprise appreciation party for Jason and Rebecca.  Hmmm, and I’m wondering why I’ve been so oddly tired the last couple of days. 

 

Monday night’s baseball game was our last of the season.  We lost and were thus are out of the play-offs.  I have to say though it did end up being a great season.  While there were some additional stresses from assistant coaching, we could not have been handed a better group of boys and watching Matthew improve immensely and really learning to love the game has been SO exciting.  Matthew ended his season with a 1000 batting average at our last game and making a couple of seriously impressive defensive outs.  I’m sad that the official season is over and yet also glad that we’ll have a little moe time on our hands (until swim lessons start next week for the boys) and now we can just keep on playing and improving!  We’ve got pick-up games scheduled for every Sunday this summer with whomever from our team is in town, and Mike and Matthew plan on ‘conditioning/training’ for next year’s season.  Matthew will move up to ‘kid pitch’ and plans to be REALLY ready.  Yeeah!