Celebrations

My parents came to Memphis this weekend to visit. The timing was perfect: they arrived the day after the boy's birthday and they were around to celebrate Easter with our family. (Which may have been a little anticlimactic for them, since they're Presbyterian and we're Unitarian Universalist.)

They arrived Saturday afternoon, and we immediately set to assembling the lovely shelf unit they brought from IKEA! Hooray! We had a few laughs at the non-verbal pictogram directions.

We stopped laughing when we realized that we were apparently illiterate even in non-verbal pictogram, because we had put in the wrong screws and had to start over. Twice. But it finally worked, glass doors and all, and I'm proud to say that no cursing happened. At least not audibly.






See the beckoning cat? It brings wealth. It needs to work harder.


All that construction work (and egg coloring, and Sims playing) made us hungry, so we headed out to Bigfoot Lodge, the boy's favorite restaurant. Well, it used to be his favorite restaurant. But when the manager got him out of his chair, stood him in the middle of the restaurant and had everyone in the place wish him a very loud and sincere "Happy Birthday," the trauma level may have caused him to not like Bigfoot Lodge anymore. Plus, we wouldn't let him order this:

But since we used a Restaurant.com Dining Certificate that covered $25 of the meal for $6, Bigfoot Lodge is now my parents' favorite restaurant EVER since we all ate and drank (34 oz. beers!) and the check wound up being $31. NICE.

After the kids went to bed, eggs were hidden and we followed the kids pretty quickly. Because all that construction work and eating made us tired too.

The kids woke up Easter morning and quickly found most of the eggs, emptied them of candy, ate the candy, then washed the candy down with some sweet rolls. Because sugar? Makes for a wonderful breakfast. I got started on dinner, then we headed to church.

Hungry again, I guess from all the singing and listening and watching kids hunt for eggs (again), or maybe because sugar isn't such a filling breakfast, we ate Mexican food then returned to the house to make dinner.

Since my parents intend to move to Memphis in the next few years, I wanted them to meet some nice people. We have gotten to know a family who is in town temporarily from Europe (their son is a patient at St. Jude and the kids go to school together). The dad of this family mostly is still in Europe (pesky job!) but arrived here on Friday for a few weeks. So I invited them all over for Easter dinner, which was extra fun to prepare since I had the able hands of my mom in the kitchen to help. We made deviled eggs, pork tenderloin with orange marmalade, bourbon, and capers, roast chicken (my favorite recipe from this book), potato balls (my dad's favorite food in the whole world), English muffin bread, asparagus, and carrots with ginger. And since birthdays wind up more like Hanukkah than Christmas in our family, we had birthday cake for the boy.

Lovely, fun, lovely, fun. And with European cheek kissing. Ahhhh.

And yesterday we took the kids to school, watched Craig leave for work, and we didn't do much interesting, but it was nice. And barbecue for lunch. Leftovers for dinner. (Because the internets care what I eat, I know you do.)

Mom and Dad left this morning, and I already miss them. It's nice being their kid, and it's nice to have parents around who love you and see you doing things mostly correctly. They're fabulous grandparents and the kids really enjoy being around them.