Good Saturday

(A little known precursor to Palm Sunday.)

Most Saturdays, getting out of our house feels like a major achievement. Everyone is tired by Saturday, and everyone wants down time. Alas, we don't tend to agree on what that is.For the kids it means getting up at the crack of dawn to play, while for us it ideally would mean sleeping in. For the kids it means seeking as much undivided adult attention as possible, while for us it ideally would include a peek at the newspaper or a magazine over breakfast. For the kids it means staying in the house, while for me and Tom it ideally means getting out to enjoy something different from the daily routine. For the kids it means family-only time, while for us it ideally would mean some social interaction with others whom we don't get to see in the crush of the weekday routine. All of which is to say, it's hard to achieve perfect Saturday relaxation on everyone's terms around here.

So today it seemed like great good luck that we happened on a plan that worked for everyone, with relatively little stress. Having started the effort to get out the door at 10:05 am, by 10:25 we had managed to bundle everyone into the car (Movie Star Poop Car, that is--thank you, Alice), and headed down to the college, where a group of science faculty, science majors, and community science educators were putting on a low-key science fair for kids, with simple demonstrations, experiments, and displays. I hadn't known what to expect, but it turned out to be just our speed. It wasn't too crowded either, meaning no waiting, and all the undergraduate volunteers were incredibly friendly to the kids. I think Edith's favorite part was playing with dry ice, while I marveled at holding a human brain in my hands. Alice wasn't so sure about the robot that kept bumping into us (courtesy of its young operators).

Afterwards we ate at the campus dining hall, always a treat, and Edith got to jump in a bouncy castle that some of the college students had rented for the sidelines of a campus soccer tournament. No waiting! No time limit!

We picked up some invitations for her birthday party on the way home, and while Alice took a 4-hour nap (!), Edith and I filled out the invitations and hand-delivered the ones going to neighborhood kids. One of the things I like most about where we live is that we went to drop off five invitations at five houses, all on our block, and it took an hour, because at each house the neighbors came out to talk, or had us in to look at their remodeling, or invited us to have a drink and meet their visiting friends, or discussed their upcoming travel plans. We lucked into such a great environment here; I want to know how to find that wherever we land next.

Another novel feature of the day was that Tom was on-call chaplain for the police for the first time, meaning we spent the day following the happenings in town on the police radio he was carrying. At first I wasn't paying attention to the crackling voices on the walkie-talkie, slightly irritated that they were distracting Tom from our family day, but by dinnertime I was hooked, trying to interpret every conversation between the dispatcher and the officers on patrol--the multi-car accident at an intersection on our regular commute, the domestic disturbances, the cars without visible plates, the narcotics bust, the toddler who fell off her daddy's shoulders, the liquor violations, the mentally ill people in trouble, etc. It was an interesting, if sobering, alternative narrative of a day in the Springs to have running in the background while our own family tried kid-friendly science experiments, chatted with the neighbors, and laughed, joked, and tickled its way through the bedtime routine.