Y’all.  I’m zonked.  It’s been a WEEKEND, and before that, it was a WEEK.  Is there a happy medium between sunshine-filled, soul-satisfying weekends and weekends that feel like one long screeeeeech?  Because I’m looking for that.  This weekend was the latter.  I had the trifecta of kid-shrieking excitement: a trampoline birthday party on Friday evening, a Chuck E. Cheese birthday party on Saturday, and an afternoon at Scramble – the noisiest, wildest, most overwhelming and overpriced indoor playground in D.C. – on Sunday.  The birthday parties were made worse by the fact that Peanut hated them.  She was afraid of the trampolines (don’t ask me to explain that, because it’s not like she’d never seen a trampoline) and Chuck E. Cheese is her personal hell.  It’s mine too, so I was sympathetic, but at the same time – I’m trying to teach her the lesson that we show up for our friends.  Even when we don’t want to.  Part of me is like – well, shoot.  She hates this, and so do I.  We should just decline the invitations if it doesn’t make either of us happy to force ourselves to these birthday parties.  But – we show up for our friends and that’s just what we do.  (And for what it’s worth, she has fun after she’s warmed up a bit – even at Chuck E. Cheese – and the other moms are loving, kind women that I enjoy spending time with, so we’re both actually fine.)  So I’m gritting my teeth and getting through, and so is she – and we rewarded ourselves with pimiento cheese and the Kentucky Derby on Saturday afternoon (what a terrible decision by the stewards though, right? Maximum Security was clearly the best horse in the race, and now I think we can count 2019 out as a Triple Crown year).

As if two birthday parties in a weekend wasn’t bad enough, Nugget needed to run off some energy on Sunday, but it was raining cats and dogs, so the playground was out and we were left with Scramble, which I like even less than Chuck E. Cheese.  Because the thing about Chuck E. Cheese is – yes, it’s loud and bright and overstimulating, but I love their “everyone who comes together leaves together” policy.  (If you haven’t been to a Chuck E. Cheese party recently, they now stamp hands at the door.  Every party that arrives gets the same stamp.  And the stamps are invisible, so the only way to read them is under a special light.  No kid goes out the door without an adult with a matching hand stamp.  So every molecule in my brain is screaming from the flashing lights and screaming kids and beeping video games but I am not afraid of my kid being dragged off by a stranger or wandering out the door and into the road if I blink or turn away to tend to their sibling.  And removing that one source of anxiety makes the rest bearable.  At Scramble, it’s a total free-for-all, there are always at least ten kids crying and a contingent of roaming big kids who get their kicks by bullying the littler ones, and I am constantly terrified when Nugget goes into the two-story play space that he’ll come out somewhere I can’t see him and end up drifting out the door and into the parking lot or being bundled into a white van and driven away.  I’m a lawyer; we dwell in the Land of Worst-Case Scenarios.  We spent two hours at Scramble on Sunday afternoon and I had a low-grade panic attack the entire time.)  But I don’t want to give the impression that the weekend was all bad.  The best part was – Zan came over on Sunday morning!  We spent a couple of hours chilling on the couch, watching Spider-Man (Peanut made sure to call Zan’s attention to her personal favorite part of the movie, when Peter Parker’s pizza gets stuck to the ceiling), sipping homemade sparkling water from the Sodastream, and catching up on life.  It was restful and peaceful and definitely set me up for, at least, the afternoon.  And now another week dawns and I’m making it work.

Reading.  It was a busy week at work, which usually translates to a slow reading week, but not this time.  My giant doorstopper Edith Wharton biography was due back at the library on Saturday, so it was crunch time and don’t say I can’t deliver when it’s crunch time.  Since it’s absolutely enormous and clearly a health risk to haul on the Metro, I also made my way through the rest of the Wendell Berry essay collection I was reading at the beginning of last week, then burned through Outer Order, Inner Calm in one day (there are some margins in that book, I don’t hate it) and started Factfulness, which is as uplifting as promised.  I finally finished Edith Wharton on the playground on Saturday – just in time to return it to the library and dust off my shoulders.  On Sunday, I flipped back and forth between the first volume of Giant Days – which I read almost straight through with one eye on Nugget belly-flopping down slides at Scramble – and Good Omens, both for my book club on Wednesday and in preparation for the show dropping on Amazon Prime later this month.  So – yes.  A busy week.  The early part of this week will be dedicated to polishing off the rest of both Good Omens and Factfulness and then – I’m not sure what next.  I still have a tall stack from the library, but it’s gradually dwindling.  I’ll try to focus on that, but I did just get a lovely new Folio Society edition of Sense and Sensibility, so good intentions may not prevail.

Watching.  The usual, mostly.  Snippets of what the kids were watching.  Zan got to experience the majesty of Spider-Man on Sunday, but we were talking the whole time and I missed most of my favorite lines.  (Not all, though.  In my universe it’s 1933, and I’m a private eye.  I like to drink egg creams and I like to fight Nazis.  A lot.)  The only grown-up watching was on Sunday night – the Harvest Festival episode of Parks and Recreation – one of my favorites – take that, curse!  Man, that show is just brilliant.

Listening.  The usual: podcasts, podcasts and more podcasts.  The episode of Sorta Awesome on “Burnout” was excellent, as expected.  And I felt so seen by Sarah and Meagan as they talked about fumbling toward the school year finish line on The Mom Hour.

Making.  Well – not much.  It was one of those running-around-screaming weekends, as I said above.  Not a lot of time spent jamming to folk tunes while kneading sourdough and chopping veg in my kitchen, or hacking through the basement purge project.  I did make a couple of things, though.  A work document.  (If I’m counting last week, I made a LOT of work documents.)  Progress on my 2018 family yearbook – photos are selected through our Cornell trip last June.  And phone calls to catch up with my high school BFF (milestone alert – her daughter has pierced ears now!) and favorite aunt (currently on a trip to Santa Barbara – I told her she MUST go to the Botanic Garden) while Nugget played pirates on the playground with a new friend.

Blogging.  A Classics Club book review for you on Wednesday, and my May garden to-do list on Friday.  Check in with me then!

Loving.  New podcast alert!  This week I started listening to The Literature Lady Podcast, which just launched (so you can get caught up quickly) and currently has three episodes available.  I’ve been following The Literature Lady, PhD on Twitter, where she hilariously tells the stories of forgotten heroines from history using GIFs, and she’s one of the only reasons I’m still occasionally meandering over to that platform right now.  Her podcast is awesome in all the same ways – the tagline is “telling the tales of badass women from history and literature.”  YES, MOAR THIS.  I started with episode two, about Temperance Flowerdew, survivor, and how Captain John Smith was an @$$hole.  LOVING.  Go listen right away, and check out her Twitter feed while you’re at it!

Asking.  What are you reading this week?