A sleepover and a night out
The last weekend in February was a pretty exciting one. It started with Ben’s last basketball game of the season. It was a little bittersweet. This season of basketball has been a bit grueling with practice every single night and Ben felt like he was missing out on some of the activities he really enjoyed after school, like Knowledge Bowl practice and Board Game club to name a few – not to mention the scheduling difficulties it caused. We did thoroughly enjoy watching him play. He really improved over the season, getting fast and more aggressive on the court, grabbing a lot of rebounds and a few steals, and putting up some baskets. I think this may have been our last season of basketball out of him, however. From here we will likely just get driveway ball – I do love banging into him in the driveway though.
The big excitement at our house was our first sleepover. Sam has been asking to have some kids overnight for a while. One of his friends had a pretty big life event recently and Sam and he have become really tight and wanted to celebrate together. So, we invited him over. Ben wasn’t big into sleepovers so this was a first for our family. Ben’s girlfriend came over to hang out and the kids all had pizza and ice cream and we played some games. Sam and his friend took advantage of their time together with Rocket League and Oculus – which just seemed silly to me because they can play these things together when they aren’t in the same house… Sam’s friend decided he loves our dogs, even though I’m fairly certain he is allergic to them. We all played Wii. The boys stayed up way too late and we were all tired the next day.
We took Sam’s friend home at noon. He could have honestly stayed all day, he is the sweetest kid and we all had fun with him here. Saturday evening, Jeff and I had a date. There’s a local musician, Allegra Hernandez, whose shows I thoroughly enjoy, and a friend of ours let us know she was going to be playing in the Drake neighborhood, so we decided to make a night of it.
While sitting at Malo for dinner we were trying to think back to the last time we had gone out to eat by ourselves and it had been months. Any date activity outside of food had been even longer. It was crazy that we had let it go this long. Before we left for the night I had been sitting at home thinking of ways to get out of it because I really didn’t want to make the effort to get dressed and leave. While I knew from prior experience I would be happy we had, it was hard to believe sitting in my sweats, surrounded by dogs with my book singing her siren song. But my wisdom from experience was right – she usually is, it was worth it.
We had a great dinner. I got Jeff to try barbacoa, he fell in love, and a sweet friend gave us a recipe – we now have cooking plans. We went to the show. I can’t remember the last time I had a hand stamp. I was awash with memories of all the live music I used to see. Allegra plays in this really unique style. I read once that a lot of the music she listened to growing up was 90s grunge, you can hear it. There are undertones of that Nirvana, Seattle sound in there, with a smattering of the punk rock that their sound grew out of, but she’s given it an updated flair with not only her own style but the lyrical themes. We watched her play with a band we hadn’t seen before which had more of a jam-band feel to it. It was a fun show. The last band of the night came on, it was a Poppy-Paramore-esque-Rubbersuit band. We headed home early. The boys were disappointed – they wanted more screw around on youtube and video games time – they needed sleep.
Sunday Jeff and Sam were off to baseball camp and Ben and I got to have our coffee shop time.
