Thursday, July 06, 2006

Kid Visit

I mentioned a few posts ago that my plan for last weekend was to have our 10-year-old kid friend come over Thursday night and hang out with us all day Friday. So what was that like?

Exhausting! She's a really charming kid, and I enjoyed her a lot, but I was also really ready to drop her off when we did.

Whenever we were at home, she was in my lap, like a giant cat, telling me stories or asking me questions or poking or tickling me. It was sweet but also took all of my attention to keep up with.

Thursday night when she got here, we went out and played tennis for over an hour. It was pretty late - we got to the court at 10 pm - and I was actually ready for bed, but she was full of energy and we all had a good time.

Friday morning we all got up and ate breakfast and then went to the pool at our rec center, which is just a fabulous (indoor) pool with a lazy river, buckets that dump water on you, lots of areas to play in, a big-ass water slide, and so on. I had always wanted to bring a kid there to properly have fun. We stayed there a couple of hours and got completely worn out playing chase in the lazy river (which involved a lot of running "upstream"), among other things.

Back at home, she was all "What's next? What's next?" We ate lunch and then played Monopoly - which Mosch hates but won anyway. Then we watched the Miyazaki movie "Spirited Away", which is probably officially my favorite movie ever. (It's the one where the girl's parents turn into pigs and she works in a bathhouse for the spirits.) And then it was time to take her back home. We stopped on the way and played some more tennis.

It doesn't sound like that much, but I was completely worn out by it. I can only imagine that if you actually live with children (for instance, if they are your kids), you get used to interacting with them so it doesn't take as much attention and exhaust you continuously. (I know babies are continually exhausting, but 10 year olds?)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was interested to find out that Mosch hates Monopoly (I may have known this before, but I didn't remember it). I hate it too, to a crazy extent. This must reflect my heretofore unacknowledged deep-seated hatred of the capitalist system.

(The phrase is deep-seated, and not deep-seeded, isn't it?)

Anonymous said...

I used to really love Monopoly until my daughter started winning. Same with Scrabble. They are both better than Candyland though.
Tam, now you see how much fun I had when you were 10 and all the years before and after? Actually, most of it was pretty fun but exhausting.