"You is kind. You is smart. You is important." - The Help 1/29/12

Before I left work on Friday, I logged onto Blockbuster Express and rented "The Help". As of that night, I wrote my name off of the list of only something like fifty people left in the Southeast who haven't seen it yet, and I loved it. I laughed, held it together, put Crisco on my shopping list (you know, so I can test out that baggy eye trick), and just cried and cried as Mae Mobley beat against the window pane calling for her Aibi not to go. Ahhh, what a great movie.

The rest of our weekend has been as good as Minny's humor.

Yesterday, we ate breakfast at Hardee's and dinner at Zaxby's (with James, Tonya, and the kids). We shopped the dollar bins at Target for flashcards and PreK workbooks (so we can work with Jake more at home on what he's learning at school) and bought groceries.

 ***Parker is ball-obsessed. Ooooh if it's round, he's on it, and he'll actually throw it back and forth. (Jake at this age was all about anything that rolled - as in "on wheels". If it had wheels on it, it was right up his alley. I can see him now crouching/laying all the way down so he could watch the wheels roll back and forth.) As for Baby, it's all about the bounce.***

Today I tortured Jake outside our front door just before we left for church and took these of him within ten minutes.

At lunch we argued with him that microwavable hamburger helper is the same thing as the cooked-on-a-stovetop kind (he ate it; although, he likes the microwavable kind better) and afterwards we spent an hour or longer at the playground in our 'hood.

In the latter part of our day, I made this (bananas, blueberries, strawberries, and almonds - I mix sugar with the strawberries separately before putting it all together because I like mine sweet) and ate a bowl while I watched the game of basketball going on in our cul-de-sac from our kitchen window.

The finale - "Zookeeper" (the movie) in the rec room - all of us.

After two days, my opinion still stands... (On the way home from work on Thursday, Jake asked if tomorrow was another school day.  I said yes, but then we'll have two whole days off.  "Is that a long time, Mommy?", he asked me.  I answered honestly, "No.  No, it really isn't.  Not long enough.") they just weren't long enough.