Dark Side of the Carton

When you have kids, most weekends tend to be eventful. This past weekend was a little more eventful than most.

Friday night was by and large a normal day. We spent some time cleaning up the house and sitting around. Saturday morning showed up far too early and we had a soccer game at 11 so there was no time to lounge around. Between some more cleaning and prepping the kids to get out of the house, the morning literally disappeared.

The soccer game was good. The kids were a little more distracted than previous games, probably due to the heat. We ended up winning 5-1 or something. They don’t keep score in the U4 age group, but as the coach it’s hard to not want your team to win.

Lunch and then a little more cleaning too us well into the afternoon. At about 3:30pm we jumped in the car and headed for the Hyatt Hill Country Resort & Spa. Lauren and I had a room for Saturday night to celebrate our 5th anniversary, which we actually celebrated back on April 5th. We took the kids up to the resort for the afternoon to play in their waterpark that they have.

Despite the warm temps, the water was a little too frigid to stay in. We ventured into the baby pool to warm up and found out that it was the warmest place in the resort as it was heated. With the hot tubs out of commission for the afternoon, we stayed in the baby pool.

Next we headed up to the room to get cleaned up and went back to the house to drop off the kids with family.

For dinner we ended up chowing down on the buffet at the Springhouse Cafe as the individual menu items didn’t seem to be all that interesting. I ate far too much and the bartender was way too generous while making my Margarita.

As it was our anniversary, the front desk was nice enough to send us up a bottle of sparkling wine and some chocolate covered strawberries. A nice touch.

For breakfast, we headed back down the Springhouse Cafe and indulged in an awesome breakfast buffet before heading home to rescue Lauren’s family from our children.

To our surprise, the kids did great and didn’t freak out at all.

Since it was still quite early, we decided to head out to the zoo. It was a nice day after all.

The zoo was a lot of fun and it was quite nice outside, even though it looked like it was going to rain. Some of the animals were inside while the keepers cleaned their cages. One animal that was not laying around was the Sumatran Tiger. This made me a little nervous, given last year’s San Francisco Zoo fiasco. The Tiger, who is normally asleep at the very back of the barless pit, was pacing along the front edge of the ravine as if something had gotten his attention. It was amazing to see him walk that edge, but at the same time a little frightening. We moved on pretty quickly.

We finished our usual path around the zoo and headed for the car. With Fiesta in full swing down here, parking near the Zoo had become a nightmare. Upon returning to our vehicle, I noticed a wonderful gift left for us by a fellow park/zoo patron. This gift came in the form of a 3′ long scratch down the side of the van.

Thanks douchebag.

Fast forward to dinner at Chili’s last night with my mom and brother. We come out after a very long dinner, think entertaining your kids for 25-30 minutes AFTER you place your food order, and I walk over to the van to point out the scratch to my mom and notice that instead of a long straight scratch, it was now a wobbly one. That’s odd. Oh wait, this was the wrong side of the van. While enjoying our meal, someone else decided to leave a mark on my van. This time the weapon of choice was a green crayon. *Mental note to finish cleaning the 6′ line of crayon wax off the car after work and then washing and waxing to hopefully remove the actual scratch.*

So that was our eventful weekend. Needless to say, we are all exhausted and in dire need of some rest. Maybe next weekend we can relax. Doubtful.

After trashing on Amazon, I found out that maybe their shipping estimates just suck. My USPS delivered package that was slated for delivery on Monday actually showed up yesterday. Now I just have to wait for the DHL guy to come. Fingers crossed that the estimate of Tuesday is off and my PSP shows up today.

Amazon’s big thing is promoting their free shipping. I mean, why not right? It makes it look like they are giving you something for free. If you’ve ever used it though it feels like they literally wait until nobody is doing anything else and then they finally decide to pack and ship your order.

So on Monday I placed my order for a PSP and a few games. I opted to pay the $7 for shipping because I figured it would actually speed up the process. Boy do I feel duped. My order was placed at 10am on Monday and my packages, of which there are 2, both didn’t even leave the warehouse until this morning. 2 full days to pack and ship an order? Are you kidding me?

I probably would have been better off using the free shipping option.

Well, I will as soon as UPS delivers it later this week. I’ve finally made the jump and picked up one of the ceramic white PSP units complete with Darth Vader’s awesome mug on the back.

With this purchase, I have solidified myself firmly in the video game world as a complete and total nerd. I now own every current generation console and handheld gaming device. I have 5 current gaming devices and the amount of time I spend on them seems to be on the decline.

Ironically, my son’s time with my gaming systems seems to be on the rise. Funny how that works.

I think this is payment for the way I acted as a child, but no matter how many times I tell my son something he doesn’t listen. Take for instance, sticking your finger inside an aluminum soda can. I can’t count the number of times I’ve told him that the edges were sharp and it was going to cut him. Lo and behold, on the way home from school today he rears up and rams his thumb into the can and slices himself good.

I hear him in the back seat mumbling “what is this red stuff? get this red stuff off me.” I turn around and see blood running down his thumb. I quickly grabbed a kleenex and grabbed his thumb to stop the bleeding.

It was at this point that he began to freak out. I applied pressure to his thumb, while driving, until we got to the house and I could wash it and put a band-aid.

Lesson learned? Doubtful.

Kids. Gotta love them.

I know what you are thinking. “How can anyone possibly love tax time?” Right?

I don’t always love tax time, just this year. It seems that for most people, despite their best effort to get their taxes properly paid that they end up screwing something up and owing the IRS at least a little bit of money. In recent years, I’ve been in that camp. I’ve owed large sums of money and last year I actually got $8 back, which was quickly reduced to nothing when I had to pay the $20 to eFile.

This year however, I am actually getting a large sum of money BACK from the IRS. Before you jump in and tell me that I’m an idiot for getting such a large refund, let me explain. I already know that money is rightfully mine and if I were to invest it and get interest on it all year long I’d have probably close to an extra $200 in my pocket right now. That’s not the point. The point is that I started doing a lot of freelance work last year and I was very worried that Uncle Same would believe I didn’t give him enough of the pie.

So here we are and I apparently way overpaid my taxes for the year and I get a nice check back for doing so. 2 weeks later I also get my ever wonderful “Economic Stimulus” check. Normally this time of year is filled with stress and agony, but not for me. Not this year.

Hooray. I love tax time. (Until next year when I am sure I’ll owe a heaping gob of cash)

My 4 yr old is allowed to play video games. We really restrict what content he is exposed to, but we do allow him some video game time. We let him play Sly Cooper on the PS2 until we saw a negative change in his behavior. He got obsessed and did nothing but talk about the game. This resulted in my PS2 having to “break” indefinitely. Sly Cooper and all the games generating an obsession mysteriously disappeared.

Right after Christmas I bought a PS3 and we told him it was just a big DVD player. He bought that explanation, up until today that is.

Lauren tells me on our way home from soccer practice that Ethan informed her that the PS3 was “a black system”, what he called the PS2 and that it plays video games. She asked him how he knew that and he says “because of this” and points at the PlayStation logo on the front of the console. Then he grabs one of his PS2 games and points at the logo and says “See, same picture.”

Silly kid. Sometimes he’s too smart for his own good.

On Saturday, my wife and I celebrated our 5th anniversary. To celebrate, we had a birthday party for my son and worked our tails off. Needless to say we didn’t do any kind of celebrating.

Last night we finally got around to going to dinner, alone. This in and of itself is a rare event and often leaves us unsure what to do in the absense of shushing chattering children or wrestling them to stay in their chairs.

We’ve recently been picking up italian food from a place called Bravo! at the nearby Shops at La Cantera. It’s a pretty classy joint that has never let us down.

It was a Sunday night so the place was dead. We started off with some Calamari and drinks and then moved on to the main course. I had a pair of 4oz filets accompanied by Jumbo shrimp. The whole thing was drizzled in some type of garlic butter sauce. Very tastey indeed. My wife opted for an alfredo dish called Pasta Woozie.

Dinner concluded without incident and we made our way home to rescure my in-laws from my wild children. The night wound down and we all went to bed. At around 1am, my wife started to complain of stomach pains. The same pains that would hit me around 3am.

We both pounded some Pepto Bismal and went back to bed. Here it is, 4:30pm the next day and I still don’t feel quite right. Aches and cramps are making this one long day. On one hand I hope I am sick and it isn’t some type of food poisoning, which I don’t believe that it is. On the other hand, I don’t know that I can eat at Bravo! ever again.

What a shame. Let’s just hope I don’t develop some sort of aversion to Calamari from this whole ordeal.

I hate getting shots so I can totally symphatize that my kids also hate getting shots. Unfortunately for my oldest, yesterday was the fun Dr. visit that comes with having a birthday. This time it came with a 4-pack of shots. I don’t remember what the vaccinations were for, but I can still picture his screaming face as we had to hold him still while they delivered the injections.

This has to be one of the harder things to cope with as a parent. You know that your kids need these things and you also know that it is going to hurt, despite what you tell them. It just sucks in general.

I just blindly upgraded this site to WordPress 2.5 and wow. I figured it would be a minor upgrade, but there is a completely revamped dashboard and admin backend to this thing that is stellar. Great job guys, I am really loving the changes.