16. Have Fun Learning Something New

Martha's parting words to me before I left for work at Marketplace really helped me! I was especially nervous about going in because I left my first weekend assignment in deli for reasons I understand – with the five-day gap between Sunday and Saturday, retraining myself on the chicken fryers and register and serving the customers was simply less inefficient than training people who could be there more (I believe there were three more people starting back there this weekend?) – and starting working in dairy. Elijah the head of the department was a big help with that, and from eight to three Saturday morning and afternoon I was fronting and stocking and baling and stacking and especially not feeling too silly doing it. Or in the words of Will Parker from The City of Gold and Lead, I learned to do this quite quickly and got praised for it. No matter what age we are, we welcome praise.

I couldn't get quite as many hours as Martha or I would have liked this weekend, so I was off yesterday, but that is likely to change. The rest of the day with the family was pretty much hanging out at our house (although Martha did have to go back to our local Dollar Tree store to pick up a giant coloring book that she'd bought for the kids along with some essentials with the small amount we've pooled together to last us awhile) and teaching Jeffrey backgammon. You're reading that right; Jeffrey wanted to play backgammon with me. I believe I've mentioned this before, but one of mine and Martha's wedding gifts was a glass game set on which you can play chess, checkers, or backgammon. Until last year it did not get a lot of use. After looking up the rules online for I hadn't played the sport of kings (oh wait, that's chess, and Jeffrey usually skunks me at it) in a while, we played and had fun with it!

Our son picks up rules, though he may not always like them, quickly enough and he gets clever enough to play for keeps! Which is all right with me, because so do I. After church Sunday morning we surprised the kids by taking me out for Father's Day to the Ground Round restaurant where on Sundays we get to pay what the kid weigh for their meals ($1.45 between the two) and today I got to spin a wheel for a meal discount, a free dessert, or a prize package. Got three dollars off our meal, and with the Wikki Stiks (think bendable stickable mini Tinkertoys) all of us made our family – if you can see that photo on top of the page, left to right that's supposed to be me, Jeffrey, Martha, and Sarah. The kids always want mommy between them … but that wasn't so when we were at the Heritage Park Friday night for Minot's “Get Up and Play” family fun night.

The favorite pastime for the kids while we were waiting for it to be dark enough to show Despicable Me 2 on the outdoor screen seemed to be sliding down the hill on cardboard. We'd parked by a friend's house a block away a few hours before, and we got through half the movie before deciding to return home – it was a great turnout, and the kids HAD seen that movie before, but Martha and I could barely hear it with the crowd around us. We'll rent it soon. Later Sunday after I'd napped – and I really enjoyed Martha, Sarah, and Jeffrey's cards, especially the one Jeffrey made for me at school, where Father's Day is so often neglected simply because it falls in summer. It does tend, subtly, to make the man of the house feel left out. And even though my playing catch with him at Oak Park yesterday left something to be desired, it was still great to have fun with him and the new friends he made.

Happy Mather's Day. My friend in Michigan who came up with this is ingenious. Combining “mother” and “father” and going to all the single parents who serve the dual role for their kids (and it's a safe bet it will NEVER be confused with the seventeenth-century ministers I first thought of with that name); but time is already running out to have this ready for 2015! This morning I got to bring the kids to church for their first day of Bible camp at our church Bethany Lutheran and it sounds like they're having a great time … at least it did when I left this morning. I'll find out more about it tonight when I get home. And I hate curtailing my Sunday morning service teaching the Parable Playhouse class for our Rotation Sunday School or lectoring from the podium at service, but as we're in need of funds now and I don't know what my weekend work schedule is right now, I have to back off.

 

 

But a lot can happen in two or three months, David