Alex’s birthday was this week. This weekend he wanted his go-to birthday, which was to have a sleepover with a bunch of friends and play video games all night. So that’s what we did, on Friday a bunch of his friends came over after school and the girls bugged out. After I got home from work the girls left, picked up the pizzas and dropped them off for us, then headed for a motel with a pool to stay overnight. I stayed home to monitor things but they were all pretty self-sustaining. They barely even took the time off from the video games to eat cake and ice cream. Or pizza, for that matter, we had over half of it left at the end. I stayed in the kitchen most of the time on the computer, or watching some of the NCAA tournament (including seeing my bracket get busted early by my champion UVA getting knocked off by a 16 seed in the first round). At around midnight I went to bed and just told the boys to go to bed sometime. I woke up at around 3 and all was quiet. They started stirring by around 8 and were all gone by 10:30. Alex had been fretting all week that he was going to have to cancel the party because he was getting sick; he made it through the party ok but the following day he had lost his voice big time because he couldn’t stop shouting all evening. Saturday and Sunday were both days of rest, especially for Alex…I left everyone home from church Sunday, I only went because I was scheduled to drive a van in the morning.
Earlier in the week: Monday Beth went shopping on Clicklist because she couldn’t face going out into a crowd…but accidentally sent the grocery list to the Kroger in Columbia City, which didn’t make things any easier. She had to go out there to pick it up. But the list also included a cake for Alex’s birthday, which they did not provide, so she asked me to go pick it up after work. When I got there, there was no cake. Seems the cake had not been ordered after all. But…there were giant cupcakes, so I got 5 of them before heading home. We did a fairly simple family birthday in the evening. Alex got some sort of fancy game controller and some video game or other (and Natalie’s new phone arrived too, since hers has gone completely dark), plus a pre-order form for some new Kirby game that was being released on the coming weekend and he wanted to play with all his friends at his sleepover. Tuesday was a middle school choir/band/orchestra concert, we all went to that since Natalie was singing. It was also the date of the coaches meeting for church softball, so I missed that but no big deal…and this year the church is paying the league fees, so woo hoo! Saturday (after Alex’s party) Natalie had a school field trip to Mishawaka or somewhere for a choir concert competition. She had forgotten her shoes so she had to wake me up when Beth took her by the house in a mad dash, because I had locked her room overnight just in case. The concert went really well, they earned a silver award but it should have been gold, only the director hadn’t realized that one of the songs was supposed to be a cappella, whoops.