Weekend highlights

This was the first weekend after the publication of my new ebook, What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekend. It was…OK. There were highs and lows for reasons that I anticipated coming into these days “off” (more on that in a minute). So here’s a recap.

I feel my weekend started at 3 p.m. on Friday when I met my running partner for a 6-mile run along the river. The weather was sunny and a few degrees above freezing, which made us go fast, and made the run feel good. So that’s a mark in the “positive” category.

After I got home, my husband and I fed the kids and then loaded them into the car to drive 2 hours to go watch the Cotton Bowl with family. I enjoyed seeing the Aggies coast to a win (courtesy of Heisman trophy winner Johnny Manziel’s 516 total yards). My husband and all his siblings graduated from Texas A&M, so it’s fun to have a real football team to cheer on. My alma mater was allegedly good at football in like 1926. I’m also always up for an excuse to drink beer and eat nachos. The game was in the “good” category, but the problem was that getting there involved driving 2 hours in the car with 3 small children who are still traumatized from the 10 days spent on the road over Christmas. My daughter started screaming around 6:32 p.m. and continued until about 7:18 p.m., not that anyone was counting the minutes or anything. Adding to the fun? My two boys instantly fell asleep in the car and were not bothered a wit by the screaming, which meant that after waking up at our relatives’ house, they were awake until nearly 11 p.m. Fortunately, they were willing to watch movies in the basement, so the adults could still watch the game. But the travel was definitely a mark in the negative category. And we had to come home the next day via the same 2-hour drive. I hoped it would be better. It was not. My daughter commenced screaming at 1:55 p.m. and literally did not stop until we pulled into the driveway at 2:40 p.m. Then she became her giggly happy self again.

Fortunately, we had some fun before that, visiting a nature center and taking an extremely short hike in the woods. Bright sun feels astonishingly good in January. After arriving home, we went to tour a local YMCA, and wound up making a decision to join. I’m looking forward to having another place we can all go as a family on weekends. We stopped at the grocery store to buy ingredients for lasagna and (definitely a weekend highlight) I made an excellent version with sausage, red pepper and mushroom. Mmm…. All three of my kids took some bites, despite lasagna being an unfamiliar food, and my picky 5-year-old even volunteered that it could be in the same category as carrots, a food he liked more the more times he tried it.

After that, however, the weekend went downhill. I spent Sunday trying, ineffectively, to work. I’m behind on a number of projects and it’s bothering me. I made some progress, including quite a bit of mental progress while I took the baby for a walk. But I’m a ways from done. And after eating my lasagna last night, my kids managed quite a bit of whining about dinner tonight, despite it being hamburgers and hot dogs. Also, they’ve watched Ice Age three times this weekend. On the other hand, my husband took them out to play in the snow and swimming at the Y, so they had a pretty good Sunday.

How did you spend your weekend?

Lasagna photo courtesy flickr user Maggie Hoffman