The weather has finally been perking up, so I’ve been trying to get out “running” more often. I put the word in quotes, because at my current post-winter, life-in-quarantine fitness level, what I’m doing out there is probably somewhere in between jogging and collapsing on the sidewalk.
But hey, any movement is good and I’m trying to get at least some exercise in where I can. I like to job around this little pond near our house, and this time I was really struck by the amount of traffic on the very busy, 4-lane street by our place. There was none.
Usually, I have to do a total Frogger dance to get across this street to the side where the pond path is. But this time I could stand there and take the picture above with no vehicles in sight. Looks like the stay at home orders are really making an impact on peoples’ movement. It was peaceful, but also a little eerie.
Work was pretty par for the course, and as usual it was a balancing act jumping between emails and breaking up fights or staying “stop running!” for the 10th or 15th time.
The constant snack demand has driven us to set a rule limiting the kids to two snacks per day. We told them they could choose to have one in the morning and one in the afternoon, or both in the afternoon or whatever they want. I could see Amelia’s strategic wheels moving right away.
While eating lunch, she announced to me that she knew what her two afternoon snacks would be. First would be some of Asta’s birthday cake from the day before.
I stopped her there. “Well Amelia,” I explained, “the thing is we’ll be having that cake for dessert after dinner, so you probably want to pick something else.”
“But DAAAAAAD!”
I hear those two words, A LOT, by the way.
“DAAAAD! Cake can be a snack!”
“Yeah, Amelia, but what I’m trying to say is you don’t want to use one of your two snack choices on something you can already have.”
I was trying to help her maximize her snack to dessert ratio, and she just wan’t having it. I was surprised because she’s usually the one outwitting me in these kinds of interactions, but in this case I think she was more interested in disagreeing than she was in snacks. She eventually got the message, but it was pretty comical how hard I had to push to get there.
Since the weather was so nice, we had a nice dinner in the backyard. The kids played outside, and wanted to listen to some music from the new Trolls soundtrack. That quickly escalated to a full on dance party.
You’d think a nice backyard rave would run their energy down a little (it sure did for me), but I think the kids and Asta emerged more hyper than ever.
I think in a previous post I discussed the inverse equation where as kids’ energy increases, grown up energy decreases, and that was certainly in play last night. We did eventually get them to bed, boy it was a struggle. I probably got more exercise chasing after two kids and a puppy than I did from that “run” mentioned up top.
