Lovelihood

The Boy found a new chess-versary (that's chess+adversary) in his oldest cousin this evening in between bouts at the Wii and manic/epic iPad battles. After an attempted stalemate , The Boy rallied back to a much lauded win. Totally awesome.

The standard three-seat configuration of airplanes and the four-person configuration of our family makes for a generally unrestful travel experience. And today I was the single row parent. But for the first time in 5- plus years -- maybe it was the kids' natural good-natured ness, maybe it was our abundance of electronic devices -- I was able to work on my own project in semi-peace. And air travel suddenly became a lot less painful.

The kids and I haven't been on a plane for a couple years, our last trip with babe in arms nearly doing me in completely. To psych ourselves up for tomorrow's big travel day, we charged and loaded up every personal electronic device we own, and, on the less highly-technical end of the spectrum, I packed up the fancy crayons purchased just for our re-introduction to air travel.

Part of our ongoing Angry Birds project, the basic red bird, slightly mis-proportioned, but appropriately angry-looking.

The Boy completed his first organized run this morning, crossing the finish line to receive his participatory prize (more than I got for completing my run) and, it being his first race, his very own PR. I'm hoping he'll have many more of these.

Sweeping up the back deck this afternoon, The Boy came across remnants of warmer days spent outside. The plastic bubble wand, having plastic bottle counterpart months ago, was parched for fuel. And I one-upped the old dishsoap in water trick by adding a jigger of glycerin to the solution to make more stable bubbles. So that's why I keep a gallon of glycerin under the sink.

I picked up the packet (conveniently close to my favorite margarita purveyor) for this weekend's race. And for the first time, I picked up a bib for The Boy's entry in the Kids dash.