Mr. Smith is one of those miraculous people who is able to maintain friendships over his lifetime. I say miraculous because I am an astonishingly bad friend in that regard. I am not good at keeping in touch. I have lost touch with people due to my crappy social skills and my overwhelming social anxiety over the years, it makes my head spin.
So, Mr. Smith has a childhood friend who has a little cherub of a son. He just turned one and we were lucky enough to be invited to his birthday picnic/hike.
You should know that Mr. Smith and I are not "outdoorsy" folks. I pretty much think camping is barbaric and Mr. Smith hates bugs, so this was pretty big stuff for us to go to this event. Also, I am a complete wreck when it comes to going to places and talking to people.
Suffice it to say, we had a few hurdles to deal with on Saturday.
Not to mention that traveling through this world with Grand Master H and Famous Baby C can be a minefield of social miscues the likes of which...well, give me tons of material for this here blog.
Can you stand this cuteness? Seriously?
Okay, the funniest part of this whole thing is that the children, Grand Master H and Famous Baby C, are shaping up to be social butterflies and their parents pretty much just suck. Both children were polite and well-behaved. I barely recognized them.
And here is the birthday boy all ready to go on his hike in style.
And since he is the guest of honor, we agreed to go on his birthday hike with him. And right about then was when Mr. Smith started to get...ummm...agitated.
Mr. Smith does not like to go into the nature. He like to see him nature on a television or computer screen. Hiking is not his deal. He doesn't even like going with me to pick out the Christmas tree and that is basically a glorified parking lot that happens to have trees planted in it instead of cars.
And then things got pretty stabby when Mr. Smith saw this:
At that point, Mr. Smith starting a pretty aggressive campaign to purchase larger and larger firearms. He feels that we need to be packing heat on the off chance that a mountain lion approaches us and thinks, "BUFFET!"
Despite the violent protests of certain members of our party, we soldiered on and the kids had a great time "reading" the flyer and telling us what they would do if they saw a mountain lion.
They caught a few menacing looking black beetles and just generally had a great time.
Baby C even found a dog willing to play fetch with a total stranger.
And as we were walking back, Famous Baby C spotted Miss L's mother flying a kite. From that moment on, Baby C was a stalker. She wanted to fly that kite. For the rest of her natural life.
Both of our children were polite and friendly. They were delightful. It made us both so proud to see that they spoke up and were cooperative and well-behaved. You never know how these things are going to go down, so part of the anxiety is what bag of tricks your child is going to unleash in public.
We all had a lovely time and the best part...both children slept late (past 5:30, which I know for the rest of the world is not late, but around here, that is late).
And then came Mother's Day, a whole new ballgame with a whole new playing field and all manner of potential pitfalls.