Happy Mother's Day!

I usually take weekends off, but I thought I'd post a special Mother's Day edition of the blog, since it's not yet time for the Sopranos and all the nightly chores are finished. [Sidenote: I wish there was something like a time bank where we could get credit for the 15 minutes Vicki and I spend at the end of every night picking up toys. Each year, we could check our balance and then be given that time back to sleep in or go to the movies or just have extra time to take Samson out someplace fun. The Mayas had something like this, but I think they used their extra days for fasting and mourning. I'll keep my penance to the nightly corralling of Thomas and all his friends, who somehow are always in between the couch cushions. I know Samson and his whole crew really, really like Thomas, but I'll be honest, trains with fixed smiles kind of creep me out.]

In any event, the weekend passed like my year in fifth grade. Basically, under a threat that never quite materialized. In this instance it was bad weather (in the other, it was military school). Despite said threat's failure to pan out, my behavior was shaped accordingly, which meant I ditched the weekend plans I'd made for us to go biking and have a picnic. [For anyone interested, I also learned to raise my hand to speak in class and stopped trying to "bring a little comedy" to Mr. D's class.]

Even so, it was a nice, laid-back weekend. On Saturday, we checked out a local park we hadn't been to in a while and just generally hung out. Lots of fun stuff for Samson to climb.

This morning, I thought we'd let Vicki sleep in and go get her some flowers from the farmer's market. Samson is big on pink flowers [I'm pretty sure he thinks it's one word], and so we got some fresh mini-donuts from the mini-donut guy and made our way leisurely around the market. Of course, to do this meant we were skipping church, which little Sammy Superego noted a few times by looking up at me and questioning "Church? Church?" The market is also near a huge Lutheran cathedral, so the sound of their bells tolling at 9 only reinforced our dereliction of Sabbath observing. But we did have fun, and there was even a guy there playing guitar [curiously, he dedicated "No Woman, No Cry" to all the mothers at the market].

And we did get those pink flowers.

Later in the day we hit the spring carnival at the zoo and got to catch up with our old friends the penguins and giraffes.