What an exhausting weekend! I am so sore this morning, I really feel like someone beat me from head to toe. This getting old shit is for the birds. I generally sort of always wish I had been able to have a child younger, but weekends like this past one REALLY make me wish that’s how things had gone. Man, I am sore and tired.
Saturday morning, I took my son to a friend’s house to pick up a couple of pairs of pants she was giving us for him. They invited us to stay and play for a while and I love that my son had no social problem at all with digging right in and helping himself to their toys. He is truly a social creature like his Mom, and he had a really great time. After that, we went to lunch and then home for a nap. I then got my stuff together to go to Dobama theater, where I was lucky enough to have a small part in a larger than life, wonderful production of a number of short plays as part of their annual Spring Fever benefit. Lots of old friends and made some new ones as well, and we ended up at a restaurant across the street afterwards where wine and conversation flowed in the crazy way it does when creative people come together. It was awesome.
Yesterday morning after breakfast, I took the kid down to the metroparks, where we ran about a mile (me chasing him) and then he hopped from boulder to boulder while I walked next to him for another quarter mile or so. I just wanted us to get some outside time and intended to get going after that. I mean, he’s just shy of 5, 1.25 miles is plenty long enough, but then he spied this big, open field and bet me we could run all the way to the other side where the cars were. I looked warily at the 200-foot or so field, my hips and legs already smarting from the earlier chasing, having not yet recovered from my long, lunchtime run late last week, and suggested we instead try to make it to the tree that was about half the distance. No, he insisted, to the CARS Mom, let’s GO. So off we went, him tearing away at full speed and me galumphing along well behind him, waiting for him to get tired and stop. But he didn’t. He went the whole way, and then waited for me to catch up at the other side. This is the point in which he begins to pass me, I thought. I didn’t know it would come so early. I’m not in horrible shape for an old lady with a lot of injuries, past broken bones and a major back/spine issue, but man, this kid is like a rocket with unlimited boosters. We sat on a curb at the other side and rested awhile, him playing in the dirt/mud, and then we started back. He whined he was too tired to run, so we walked, and then halfway across he decided we should run the rest of the way. Jesus, kid, give your old mother a break. But no.
Home to change out of our muddy clothes, and then to Earth Fest at the nearby fairgrounds, where I got my car stuck in the mud for the first time ever. Three strapping young men pushed us out, for which we were very thankful, and then my son insisted he could also push the car. Once I parked on higher, firmer ground, he got out and pushed and pushed and insisted he moved it a little, and said he could lift the car up if he wanted to. I had a flashback to the original Superman movie, where the little Clark Kent lifts the car off his father. We had a great time at Earth Fest, even though most of the kid-related things to do there are crafty, and he is not a craft kid at all. But he got his face painted and we sampled smoothies from the Vitamix table and learned all about how this sewer truck works. Then he danced and ran and danced and ran and jumped and twirled and mugged and made me laugh so hard while this live band was playing, I thought I would piss myself. He is pure joy.
We crashed hard for nap, then got up and took his cheap, shitty kite over to the empty parking lot next door, where we ran around with it for about 45 minutes and generally were not successful in getting it to fly.
Then I cooked ALL THE THINGS, and we ate a lot of dinner, and then back out to the parking lot to kick around a ball for awhile – hitting, running, chasing, throwing. This bit was pretty hard on my knees as the stop-start motion is pretty owie still.
Finally he went to bed, and then I had to lift, because I have to. Cannot let this age get on top of me yet, not while he’s still so young and needs me to play with him so hard.
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