Happy Birthday Peter!

Peter has the day off today. I hope he gets some good blobbing done. Poor thing still had to make the kids lunch and take the younger two to school. I had hoped to totally pamper him and do all the things he usually does but Monday morning is not conducive to spouse birthday pampering. Hopefully he's got rid of them now and is snuggily back in bed, playing with his birthday toy. I bought him a heart rate monitoring watch.

Gosh, you must be thinking. I didn't know Peter was such an active sportsman.

More of a plan, really, at this stage. As I told the heart rate monitoring watch salesperson. When he asked what sort of model I was looking for I shrugged helplessly and told him my husband loves gimmicks. Er, gadgets.

Anyway, I'm sure this is going to get Peter fit. The heart rate monitoring watch salesperson practically guarantees it. Maybe I should provide progress reports on this blog.

We had a busy weekend. Received a last minute invitation from some friends to supper on Friday night, so I devised a cunning plan in which the kids hitched a ride to Peter's parents with my parents on their way back home from their usual Friday visit. The invitation was to join them for take-out pizza, only I neglected to mention this to Peter, and when the host brought out a pizza menu Peter thought it was a joke and just caught himself in time from making a potentially awkward comment. I must admit, from Peter's point of view, since the evening began (and continued) with champagne cocktails, pizza did seem rather incongrous. Those champagne cocktails have quite a kick on them. Sort of like double-drinks which taste a lot less lethal than they are.

We went to fetch the kids on Saturday and had lunch with Peter's parents and my parents, and played Cranium. The kids love it. Robyn especially finds it wildly exciting. Lauren is too little to do any of the challenges herself but enjoys the guessing part. Robyn did a very good charade of a computer virus which involved lots of typing and coughing and moaning.

On Sunday morning I was woken by Lauren running to wake Robyn and yelling excitedly that it was raining. For months I've been promising them that as soon as we have a rainy day on the weekend and don't have other commitments, we'll take them to do lots of fun stuff at Gateway. So after church and about an hour of cleaning the house (which had been getting very icky thanks to the rain and Angie being off sick), we headed off to Gateway and spent the rest of the day having lunch, racing scalectric-type cars (Peter please correct my terminology), climbing the indoor climbing rock (the girls and I), hanging out in the toyshop and letting the kids spend some accumulated pocket money, eating ice-creams, watching a movie, and finally eating supper at the Spur (kids' favourite chain restaurant thanks to the computer games and big play area).

At the toy shop Daniel chose a "fork-pen" (a plastic pen-knife with all sorts of cool attachments) and a cell phone, Lauren, in an interesting juxtaposition of gender stereotyping and otherwise, chose a foam dart gun and a pink glitzy Le Teen set consisting of notebook, pen, mirror, and cell phone, which, sadly, worked for only ten minutes. She's a bit devastated and expects compensation. Robyn chose a three-part set containing a clock, a calculator with games, and a tiny radio and headset. She is in seven-year-old heaven and is also Fantastically Cool.