Memorial Day Weekend Wrap Up

My parents were planning to be here for Meera’s birthday, so we planned too for them to extend their stay for us to all spend Memorial Day Weekend together here in Pennsylvania. Two of the things at the very top of my list of Things That I’m Most Grateful For are these: 1) having the great fortune to have parents with whom I’ve had a life-long awesome relationship, and 2) having the chance now, in my own adulthood, to have parents with relatively flexible work schedules which allow them to spend an enormous amount of time investing in our long-distance parent-child and grandparent-child relationships. These two things are huge in my life and I never forget how special they are. I know it is highly unusual to have such solid and reciprocally good relationships with my own parents (and to have my husband truly adore them and vice-versa). I also know — first hand — how lucky I am to have parents with big careers, but whose careers are so flexible that they can spend a lot of time with us despite the fact that we live 8 hours (on a good driving day) apart. Growing up, my parents’ work schedules were very inflexible and their time off very infrequent. That makes me especially appreciative for what we have now. I hope that all of this will have a long-lasting positive impact on my own children — their chance to witness first-hand, and be a part of themselves, positive relationships across generations. This is something I’ve always hoped for, and something I’m so proud to be accomplishing now in my family life.

Anyway…. back to Memorial Day…

We spent it with MorMor and MorFar here at our house. The weather was summer-like and our pool had just been opened up the week before. Our Memorial Day Weekend basically consisted of three main themes:

• Baseball
• Pool Time
• Eating

The boys are way into baseball. Kyle especially is super into it. They (Kyle especially) loves when MorFar visits in part because he knows he’ll have a baseball playmate 24×7. Kyle and my dad could eat, sleep, and breath baseball (and Red Sox) if ever given the chance. And Owen is quite the baseball lover in his own right, and usually very happy to go along for the ride. One thing they love to do with MorFar is to go find baseball fields (any baseball field) to play on. MorFar pitches and K & O hit and run. When they can get Braydon to go along, Braydon plays outfield. K & O are really good hitters. K especially. At one point during the weekend we all piled into the car and drove to one of the fields they like to play on. MorMor, Meera, and I cheered like crazy from the stands. The boys all played like crazy on the field. Anybody who happened to have seen us surely thought we were either absolutely nuts or extremely eccentric. Afterward we all went to Rita’s for frozen custard. For K & O, that particular afternoon was probably the highlight of the long weekend.

Our swimming pool is open for business and Memorial Day Weekend kicked off a great summer of pool time!

…and then there was the food. We have no problem with indulging in stereotypically all-Americana-Memorial-Day-esque food at times like this~~ bbq ribs, hamburgers, hot dogs… it is all good. We had our first watermelon of the season and it turned out that Meera loves it!

And now~~ on to summer 2010!