Perfect weekend

At the end of the day on Sunday, I realized why we’d had such a great weekend…it was because every member of my family had the opportunity to do things that they love to do.

My husband Rick brought Tim and a couple of Tim’s friends to Canobie Lake Park in celebration of Tim’s twelfth birthday. They rode roller coasters. They drank Coke and ate hamburgers with French fries. They got drenched in a water ride. They let themselves become dizzy in the hall of mirrors. It was a dream day for him. (Oh, and Tim had plenty of fun as well. Just joking.)

Meanwhile, I brought Holly and a friend of hers to the science museum. Not the world-famous one in Boston; the small-scale version in a neighboring town, which to Holly’s eternal delight includes a hands-on art studio within their definition of “science.” It’s a small enough place – three floors in a rehabbed Victorian house – and Holly is familiar enough with the layout that she and her friend could explore on their own, which meant that for a five-dollar admission ticket, I could sit on the bench near the entrance for two hours reading the past three issues of the Sunday New York Times. Five dollars can’t be spent much more indulgently than that, in my opinion.

Tim and his friends came back to our house for dinner. While the pan of homemade macaroni and cheese baked in the oven, the boys played Ultimate Frisbee on our lawn. I’m not sure who enjoyed it more: the players or me, as I watched them, these generous and pleasant boys I’ve known since they were in preschool who will soon be teenagers.

The boys were staying for a sleepover, and after dinner they tucked into a marathon session of video games that would go on until nearly midnight. Holly does not especially like playing video games. She does like watching Tim and his friends play video games, but that night she had an even better option: my mother came over to babysit and played Holly’s favorite board game, Tea Party, with her.

It might seem odd that Rick and I went out while Tim was hosting a sleepover, but we’d already accepted an invitation before realizing this would be the ideal weekend for Tim’s party, and my mother was kind enough to say she’d come over for a few hours, so we drove a couple of miles across town to attend an annual party that about three hundred of our closest local friends also attended. We spent the evening catching up, swapping summer tales, and commiserating about back-to-school transitions. It’s so great having so many local friends; nothing beats a night out for me where I don’t have to go beyond Carlisle city limits.

On Sunday morning I made waffles and bacon for the sleepover group before they packed up and left. Just as they had at dinner on Saturday, they thanked me and praised my cooking. Midday, Tim had a baseball game: he played shortstop, Rick coached, Holly and I picnicked and watched the game from our lawn chairs. Not even the fact that the temperature had dropped twenty degrees since Saturday could keep us from enjoying the afternoon. Late in the day, Holly and I attended an event hosted by the Carlisle Conservation Foundation to introduce townspeople to a new piece of conservation land. There was fort-building, a singalong, cake, information sheets, and well-marked hiking trails. These are definitely a few of our favorite things. (Though a friend of ours at the same event commented that with almost the entire population of Carlisle tromping through the woods together, this would be an ideal time for local drugstores to practice some price-gouging on calamine lotion and other anti-poison ivy medications.) To top off a perfect day, I stopped next door to visit with my parents and resolved two technical problems they were having, one involving a text message and one involving the auto-dial feature on their cordless phone. As I’ve written about before, fixing tech-support problems makes me feel like a super-hero.

I often bemoan the fact that we don’t put our weekends to better use more of the time. We don’t devote enough time to cultural activities, especially in the city. We don’t do as many outdoor fitness activities as I would like. I don’t even cook as much on the weekends as I feel would be optimal.

But we have fun, especially on weekends like this one. Time outdoors, time at home, time with family and friends. Weekends simply don’t get much better.