Busy weekend

What a great weekend we had! Extremely busy and non-relaxing, but fun.

Saturday morning was the usual soccer-piano lesson routine. They lost the soccer match, but not without giving it a good try. The team is a bit short on numbers this year (it's the "B" team) but this has been great for D as he is one of the "better" players in the team! His skills are starting to come along. Also, Dante's piano teacher wrote "Excellent!" on one of his pieces (that last minute practising paid off for once!).

A quiet afternoon was had, and then Dan's sister and her boyfriend arrived to babysit the boys so we could go to a 50th birthday party for a work colleague. The boys were so excited to see them. They behaved wonderfully, although they were a little overexcited. This is the first time Atti's been babysat by someone other than my parents, and I'm so glad that he did well. I was a bit worried about bedtime, but apparently he was terrific!

The party was fun. It was nice to get out at night-time. We realised that we haven't hosted a "night-time" party since before Dante was born. Can it be true? We've had people over for dinner - does that count? No, not really. How many more years before we can fob the kids off onto other people and have a bash?

Anyway, it was really good to see my work friends, especially Regina, who has been on maternity leave since August/Sept last year and whom I've been meaning to visit. She brought her daughter, Amelie - the most gorgeous creature, her "mini-me". Also, they had a jukebox machine instead of a DJ. What a great idea - with MP3s you can get a lot more songs and you don't have to pay someone per hour. Except that our songs kept getting skipped. Dan wasn't too pleased with that! And he got accused of putting on "Bob the Builder". He didn't... but everyone sang along to it anyway.

Sunday morning was tennis, our regular fortnightly thing. My parents being overseas, we ended up hosting the kids for lunch. It was good to have them over, but then we really had to rush because we had a prior appointment to visit one of Dante's school friends, Luke, and his family. We finally got there at 4:30pm but had a pleasant enough evening and stayed for dinner. The boys made a HUGE mess in the "playroom" and Luke's mother was so calm about it all. I was quite impressed with her easy-going nature. A single mother with three kids (two boys and a girl, just like our family... Dante's friend is the equivalent of Atticus). Atti had a great time hoeing into the snacks, as well as playing with the little sister and following around the big boys. We got home very late - well after 9 o'clock. Dante was the only one to fall asleep in the car and got put to bed in his clothes.

So, that was that. We are quite exhausted after all that. My folks come back in four days...