Why exactly is it that I hate Mondays?

Yeah, Monday, the day after Sunday. Mondays are play date at the park days. Every Monday Henry and I walk a half mile to the park down the road. Henry plays with his friends while I sit in a convenient shady spot and hang out with mine. I'm good for any adult conversations that come my way. After hours of listening to Henry spouting off random gibberish in his spotty four year old English, my brain tends to shut off and I find myself replying, "Yeah, that's great, Henry." He's even given me a new gibberish name and if I could only remember it I'm sure I could hold my own against any Sumerian god. So adult conversation is very precious to me, especially on weeks where I have to teach Joy School. Such as this week. So when Henry asked if we could go to the "dragon" park instead, I said no, I wanted to see my friends. He was a little annoyed, but too bad, this is my brain we're talking about. Two hours later I started herding him home. We took the shortcut back through the woods instead of walking back up the street and Henry headed towards the greenway trail trying to make one last ditch effort to go to the other park across the highway. I said no and he had a screeching cow. We were in a little clearing above the park next to the woods behind our house. I'm sure everyone within a mile thought I was murdering him out there. It'd be the perfect place for it, too. So he pitched a fit the entire way home. Two houses from home he refused to go any further so I had to carry him, kicking and screaming that he doesn't like me anymore, all the neighbors probably thinking, this is the kid who'll be terrorizing the neighborhood in five or ten years because of his mother's complete ineptitude in discipline. Which is sad because he's usually a pretty cool kid. Anyway, once I got him wrestled in the front door he got a nice stay in time out.

Maggie called right about the time he commenced further protestations and reaffirming his desire to have another mom. What, Mugablugoth (or whatever it was) not good enough for ya anymore? Finally he calmed down and sat down on the couch beside me for a make up snuggle.

"I like you, Mom."

Alright, score one for Mugablugoth.

When Ben got home I started plans for Family Home Evening lesson and found a 3-D wooden dinosaur puzzle Mom gave Henry for Christmas that I'd forgotten. So Henry and I sat at the table and started working on it. First thing I broke one of the pieces trying to extract it from the cheapo wood it was cut from. I guess that's what tape is for. After I finally figured out how the thing fit together we constructed a flimsy skeleton of some creature with four big flippers and what I only could deduce was an extra spine and ribcage stretching between its front and rear pelvises. I'm not sure how accurate the model was, but Henry thought it looked cool.

Then we had an early FHE lesson and I walked Henry down to his precious "dragon" park while Ben stayed home. About seven houses up there's a little foot path through the woods that leads down to the park and greenway leading to pedestrian bridge over the highway. The bridge is nice because we can walk to the other park now instead of driving. Every time I walk over it I can't help looking down at the eight lanes of speeding traffic, chewing on little morbid morsels, such as, "Gee, if we were walking down there we'd have been flattened about ten times by now." Although I'm a huge chicken when it comes to heights, the bridge has absolutely no effect on me. I suppose if there weren't a huge chain link cage around it it'd be a different story. The whole way Henry was singing the forest song from the Legend of Zelda Nintendo game he plays all the time. It was a nice walk, what with things cooling off, relatively low humidity, and the bazillion yellow flowers blooming where a huge swath had been cut out of the woods to accommodate power lines. The "dragon" park (Henry calls it that because of a big concrete sea serpent thing sticking out of a hill) is an exhausting one for me, mostly because it's got three sand box areas, a huge jungle gym/tunnel thingy, another ramp and slide thing, a bathroom/picnic table shelter, buttloads of sight-inhibiting trees and bushes, and hundreds of kids running all over the place, so I literally have to stalk Henry whenever we go there or I'll never see him again. I've actually lost him there a couple of times and it really made me consider implanting a GPS chip in his skull. We only got to stay about twenty minutes because I wanted to get home around six. Although Henry wanted to stay, he didn't go all psycho on me like he did this afternoon. On the walk back we almost got run over by a pair bicyclists who said hey before they zoomed off at mach 4 and I recognized them as an older couple from church (they have kids around my age). They're both really friendly and super fit and make me feel even more slovenly than usual. In fact she's the one my sister said had great boobs (this said indiscreetly during Relief Society when said great-boobed fit chick was doing an excellent job teaching the lesson, embarrassing the crap out of me).

When we got home I was happy to see Ben had decided to cook dinner for us. A grilled cheese sandwich for Henry, cool. For us, a big steaming bowl of homemade beanie-wienies. Not so cool. I forbore from eating as long as I could but I was hungry from the walk, so I reluctantly finished off what Ben hadn't eaten, baked beans out of the can nuked in the microwave with four glorious hot dog nuggets floating in the brown sludge. I supplemented my decadent dinner with the last piece of leftover frozen lasagna even though I'd already eaten some for lunch. Ben redeemed himself by emptying the dishwasher for me.

Ack. Tomorrow I get to teach Joy School. Joy.