Dad & Brenden

Dad & Brenden, originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

Hope everyone had a good Easter. Mine was mixed - besides news about poor Caboose, Ileana told me Friday my dad is going to have surgery soon - he's going to the Mayo Clinic today for consultation about the extent of the problem. I am joining Helly and a huge group of other people aboard the "Worried about Dad" cruise ship. That's all I want to say about this.

We had a nasty storm last Tuesday and I didn't realize until this weekend that we had no Internet service (that shows you how often I get on the computer at home). Apparently lightning hit pretty close to our house. Our neighbors lost some electical gadgets including their garage door opener.

I told you that to tell you this: I took Brenden on his first Easter Egg hunt Saturday and I got some photos but can't post them yet. It was set up in Sparkman Park, which is the park about 1/4th a mile away from our house. I put B in his kid carrier (I bought a new one - it's a backpack and can hold a kid weighing up to 50 pounds) and we walked over there.

The Kiwanis club sponsored this one, and I like how they did it - they found a good balance between competition vs. fairness. They divided up all the kids into age groups. In each age group's area they hid 1 golden egg, which was the 'grand prize'. All the other eggs were empty and plastic. After that it didn't matter if you grabbed 1 or 1000 eggs; every kid got the same little bag of candy.

So, when the whistle blew, all of us with little fry worked on encouraging our kids to grab eggs. Brenden picked up a handful and dumped them in some other child's basket. The mom of the other kid looked totally abashed. I was laughing and told her it didn't matter (maybe she didn't know the rules). So we ended up with a grand total of 2 eggs once the area was scoured clean. Brenden got distracted well before that happened and was trying to climb into the creek that bisects the park so I put him back in his carrier and we got his candy and walked home. He quit bitching at me when I gave him some of his loot. All in all it was fun but cold!

Sunday I raked and thatched our front yard. I chased B around for most of that, since I was unable to set the pool up for him because of the temperature. I did let him play with the hose for a while until he took his jacket off and sprayed it down. Our next door neighbor took some pity on me and let B play in her back yard with her son while I finished as much of the thatching as I could. I am surprisingly not sore! Weight training has its rewards.