Family Night

Saturday night (last night) we were all at home together, doing the usual "What should we do tonight?" talk. And I asked Wes, "What do families do together anyway?" Because so often what happens is I just want to go out, shopping or something. He likes to be on the computer with NASCAR or working on one of his many creative projects. The kids are each doing whatever, if not fighting, and we're counting down the time until we can put them to bed and veg out watching a movie or something equally no-brainer. That's really sad. So last night we said let's be a real family. So first Wes and Benny played Checkers while Rafferty and I played kick with a ball in the kitchen. Then we got out some balls and all practiced juggling. After that Wes put on some music and we played hot potato in a circle, then we made banana-blueberry ice cream in our Green Star machine. It was really beautiful, actually. To just say, we're a family, this is it. We're not going to go off and out searching for satisfaction elsewhere apart from one another. Let's be content at home. So now Wes has an idea that every week we'll have different nights: Swimming night, music night, Gymnastics/Juggling night, and ice cream/popcorn night. Oh, the picture that I'm posting with this doesn't have all that much to do with last night, but Rafferty did spend several hours in his big boy undies without incident. We've started rewarding him for poo-poos on the toilet like we did with Ben at about this age. It's scary to take the plunge and do training pants, but we really want to get it done before the next one comes. And it's funny. Lately I've been talking with so many people who've had troubles late in pregnancy like this. One lady had her boy at 35 weeks. Our babysitter's water broke when she was just at 30! So I keep thinking of all those possible things that COULD happen, and I should just stick with blissful ignorance I suppose.