Well-worn path

If anything happened over the past week, I don't know about it. I may have driven my parents back to the airport at some point, but I was in such a feverish haze I don't remember it. Being a sick parent is the worst, because your kids still need stuff from you, even if you've lumped 98 percent of the responsibility on to the other parent. They know you're around, even if you're permanently face down in your pillow, and they seek you out for insanely trivial things that they know only a mom can provide.

So, moving right along, since yesterday was the first day that I was moderately human, that's where my memory begins. I was supposed to run the 5K with Luke while Elizabeth hung out with Zach, but Elizabeth gamely offered to run in my place while Zach and I cheered from the sidelines. To say she and Luke "ran" it was a little bit of a stretch. This year we decided not to put any pressure on Luke to run at all; only to make sure that it was fun for him. So he and one of his buddies brought up the absolute end of the pack, walking, chatting, and collecting sticks along the way. The irony is that Dave was on the completely opposite end of the spectrum, and he would have won the whole race except that he wisely let a speedy 5th-grader, a crowd favorite, come in ahead of him. The final race results will show Dave in second place and me (Elizabeth wore my number) in second-to-last place. Dave was such a whirlwind yesterday; he sponsored the race water bottles and brought them all down to the race first thing in the morning, ran the race, nearly won it, and then helped with post-race activities and cleanup, then took home the box of money for counting. Meanwhile all I could do was rub my temples and mutter, "So many people..."

Later in the afternoon (yes, the day dragged on), Dave and Luke had a baseball game. This one is the first I've seen in the coach-pitch league, and I have to say that Luke was quite impressive. He hit the ball every time he was up - and he made a play that ended the game in dramatic fashion. The last batter hit a ground ball that Luke stopped, scooped up, and threw right into the first baseman's glove to get the batter out. It is such a routine play in the major leagues that you don't think too much about it, but when you see a kid doing it for the first time, it's just electric. And of course our team went wild.

Today we resolved to have a day where we just did nothing, but wouldn't you know stuff just happened. One of Dave's friends gave him a pair of great tickets to a UCLA/USC baseball game at Dodger Stadium, and Luke almost simultaneously reminded us that we had promised to take him to the grand opening of the new Lego store in Orange County. So Dave headed off to have a great time watching some baseball with Zach, while Luke and I piled into the car to make the pilgrimage to Lego Mecca.

The featured activity was helping a Lego Master Builder construct an 8-foot Yoda. I didn't really know how they would pull off the group involvement thing (picturing all sorts of kids sticking random Legos on at different spots while the Master Builder groans, "No - not there! Wait - not that piece!" and so on). But the reality was completely organized and surprisingly fun. They modeled the 8-foot Yoda after a smaller Lego version, so they used regular-sized bricks to build mega-bricks that would create an exact replica, eight times the size. Your job as a participant was to follow the (easy) instructions to make mega-bricks in various shades of brown, green, and tan. It was easy - and fun enough that everyone from kids from Zach's age to grandmas were all sitting there making bricks to hand to the builder. The only bummer was that once it was finished at 5 pm, they only had until 8 pm to enjoy it, and then they had to take the whole thing down. I should have asked how many bricks were involved - maybe 50,000? - because it was amazing to see so much work go into such a detailed project, only to have it then disappear entirely. Hey wait - hasn't that happened at our house before?

Speaking of projects, Luke and Zach both enjoy Angry Birds, but given that their iPad time is limited, they've turned to other outlets. This morning Luke built an incredibly cool Lego structure with dominoes balanced on top to be the "pigs" that would be shot down by marble "birds." But then Luke got furious when Zach later knocked the whole thing down. Zach must have been feeling guilty about it because later tonight while Luke was in the bath, Zach painstakingly built his own version of the pigs' castle for Luke, and he carefully lined up "birds" on a row of domino platforms. Then he ran to get Luke -- "Luke! I built you a new Angry Birds tower!" -- and he watched proudly while Luke shot bird after bird into the structure. And tomorrow it will be all knocked down once again.