Doesn't this seem backwards?

I got an email from a homeschooling-and-UU-Church friend alerting me that her group of mostly UU Moms (MUUMs for short) who walk together were planning to walk around the playfields of our elementary school tomorrow. This a)thrilled me to know there were some like-minded families within a mile or two of us whom we could meet tomorrow and b) made me realize that Steve and I could be walking laps around the playing fields with a walkie-talkie and the kids could stay in the house, as is their wont this winter, with the other walkie, and see us out the windows.

So, when the kids said they wanted to keep doing what they were doing this morning, Steve and I said, fine, we'll take the dogs out to the playground. And it struck me, at Lap 5, that things were a bit backward. The kids were at home doing embroidery (Maddie -- thanks Aunt Diane for the birthday embroidery kit!) and sitting at the computer (Harry exploring Stormwind city in World of Warcraft) while the parents were out on the playground!

It's a cool and windy day, so I can't blame the kids for not wanting to march about in it. Hopefully it will be warmer tomorrow for the playdate. We're off shortly to a game-gathering, another wonderful find at our UU Church. A group, again, of mostly UUers who get together every Sunday afternoon to play board and card games. The kids and I are excited.

Steve, alas, has to go into work again today. He is redesigning his magazine this issue (which adds a great deal of extra work into the normal production cycle), and this past week was supposed to be the final deadline week for the Mar/April issue, but he got sick last weekend with something like the flu and missed 3 days of work this past week. So now he's working all weekend and having to push back printing deadlines to get everything done. Oy.

And lastly, a bird update. Steve looked up our waxwing in a birding book and found that it wasn't actually a cedar waxwing but a bohemian waxwing, a far northern bird that rarely strays this far south into the continental US. Once every decade or so, when food is scarce in its normal range of southern Canada and the Pacific Northwest, it will fly further south in search of fruit on trees (like our chokecherry tree out front.) And the flock is back in the yard today, eating from the chokecherry and trilling in our cottonwoods. I'm trying to figure out how to get large owl shaped cutouts pasted to our high window above the entryway....