Oof.  Monday is back with a vengeance, huh?  After last weekend’s epic drive-a-thon, I really needed a relaxing weekend at home – and that didn’t quite work out.  Saturday was fun – we spent the morning at Apollo on the Move, a special one-day event at the Udvar-Hazy Center (an outpost of the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum) in which the restoration hangar was thrown open to the public and we got to file past the actual Apollo 11 command module being restored.  That was amazing, and the sort of thing that you can often only see if you live here – just one of the many reasons I am grateful to live in the D.C. area.  After seeing Apollo 11 (so cool!) we spent the rest of the morning wandering around the hangar – we’ve been to Udvar-Hazy many times, but it never gets old.  The rest of the weekend was downhill from there.  Steve started to feel under the weather on Saturday afternoon, which meant I was the only whole parent and I juggled both kids the rest of the weekend – a job which included holding Nugget from 3:30 a.m. onwards on Sunday morning (he’s teething, and I didn’t want him to wake Dad).  Needless to say, I was a total zombie – a cranky one – all day on Sunday, and I sort of feel like I missed out on half my weekend.  I wanted to get a presentation written over the weekend, and that didn’t happen because I was so exhausted.  So – not the best, but I suppose it could have been worse.

Reading.  It’s been a pretty good week in books.  Mid-week or so, I finally finished up How to Be a Victorian, which I really enjoyed even though it ended up taking me a week.  I would have liked to jump to some gentle fiction, but library deadlines were breathing down my neck, so I picked up Code Talker, a WWII memoir by one of the original 29 Navajo code talkers.  It was a breathtaking memoir and I learned a ton about a topic in which I’d long been interested.  Next up, still fighting the current of library deadlines, I picked up my current read – The Hopefuls – which I placed on hold months ago after my friend Katie recommended it to me.  I’m not quite halfway through, and really enjoying it.  One of my pet peeves is when people who don’t live in D.C. write “D.C. books” and get the city totally wrong.  The Hopefuls is the perfect antidote to that – you can tell the author lives here (in fact, she teaches writing at the George Washington University, where I went to law school).

Watching.  Still watching Finding Dory every day (and I still haven’t seen the entire movie straight through).  I’m not sick of it yet – making it perhaps the longest-running Disney-thon that hasn’t annoyed me, which I credit to the jokes thoughtfully strewn throughout just for the parents.  (“Guys!  I found help!  Sigourney Weaver’s here and she’s gonna tell us where we are!”)  The other interesting watch of the week was the Minimalism documentary, which I’ve been meaning to check out for awhile and which I really loved.  I’ve been trying to curate my home and life and it was definitely inspiring.

Listening.  Back to Middlemarch after cleaning up my podcatcher again.  I’ve been ruthlessly culling podcasts – unsubscribing to shows that just aren’t doing it for me anymore, and unashamedly deleting single episodes that don’t interest me.  I’m down to 12 hours and change to go in Middlemarch – which sounds like a long time, but considering the book is 35 hours long, it’s real progress.

Making.  Homemade applesauce for the kiddos – one of my favorite ways to use up apples that are just a little long in the tooth.  The whole family loves it – there’s something extra-special about homemade applesauce, easy as it is.

Blogging.  I have a family-centered week coming up for you – a recap of the Apollo on the Move event, since it was so cool, coming on Wednesday, and on Friday, an extra-special post dedicated to someone who is about to turn TWO YEARS OLD.  (Hold me.)

Loving.  This may be old news for some, and it sort of is for me, but I hadn’t really grasped the meaning.  I subscribe to the Slightly Foxed quarterly, and it’s always the BEST day when I come home and see the new issue in my mailbox.  I was vaguely aware that as a print subscriber, I had access to the digital archives, but I hadn’t really made any move to read through.  Last week I decided to check out the archives during a free moment, and I discovered – there’s an APP for that!  Seriously, who knew?  I downloaded the app and now I have twelve years of Slightly Foxed essays right on my phone, waiting for me to read them ALL.  This is a game-changer, people.  I’ve started a new wish list on Amazon, just for book recommendations from the fox.

Asking.  What are you reading/watching/making/loving this week?