This weekend was good - Saturday we had the Turkey Trot on campus and hung out in beautiful weather. A. had a great time running around and getting into trouble and learned to drink from a water bottle without spilling it all over himself.

A. has also learned somewhere (from school? Dora the Explorer? Who knows!) the word agua for water. He's been saying it for a while but it took me a few days to connect he always said it at bathtime. Yeah, I'm an observant mother.

We also went with two students to play on the playground by the river. A. loves the slides there and is generally not afraid of anything, which makes his mother very nervous! It was a good day.

We then went to our town Holiday Parade which was in the pitch black of 6:15 in the evening, with fairly pathetic lights hanging at the courthouse and lots of half-assed floats in the parade. This one company actually drove an RV as a float - that doesn't count! What kind of float is that? A. loved the ones with either animals on them or with little girls in pretty outfits. (I'm not even going to speculate.) But it did begin to get me in the holiday spirit and remind me of the schmaltzy Hallmark Christmas movies I love to watch this time of year! :-)

Sunday, W. got home from being gone for a while on business. We have reached an interesting place in that A. loves having his Daddy home but becomes incredibly clingy to ME. Tonight we had about a dozen students over for Thanksgiving Campus Ministry style, and A. would not let me leave his sight. Reverendmother commented on the absence of the word "Mama" on the list a couple of posts ago, and I wish he would stop saying that word! I also feel a bit bad for W. because A. adores him but won't give him the time of day right now. As A. figures out that W. is home for a while I think that will change, and I'll be the one that is left out.

Hopefully, when that happens I can sneak out and go see the new Harry Potter movie!

Of course, it will probably happen when W.'s whole fam-damily is here for Thanksgiving. That way, they can continue to exclude me from this whole parenting equation and gush again and again about how perfect A. and his father are. Can you tell I'm excited about the holidays? I know going to my family Thanksgiving would be filled with...um...experiences (my family reads this!) that may be less than enjoyable (picking pecans, K and K????), but I miss not being able to go home to my family. I know it is the right thing for W.'s family to come and to bond with us, and I need to give them a chance, I just feel like I'm an oddity to them, that even after 8 years of us being together that they are still looking at me like I have two heads b/c I'm a minister. Oh well, only time will tell.