‘Twas a busy, yet thorougly entertaining weekend…

After jetting home (in a rolling, plodding sort of way on I-95) on Friday afternoon, Colleen and I slipped out for a couple of hours by ourselves to grab dinner and catch a movie – kabobs at a great local joint and a screening of Babies at the local art house cinema.

Quick review? Good stuff; it chronicles the first year of four different kids from different parts of the world. There are lots of great anthropological insights to be had, though they’re all inferred (thankfully, the filmmakers didn’t feel the need to impose some sage voice-over on it); simply showing the ways that families and childrearing work around the world, but also demonstrating that despite all these cultural differences, we’re all an awful lot alike: put a baby near a cat, for example, and the kid’s going to tackle and otherwise torment it, no matter what continent it’s on (thankfully, cats are mostly patient creatures).

I expect, however, that a lot of people will watch it more for the squee factor of watching eighty minutes of babies doing cute baby things.

Much of the rest of the week was occupied by a family camping trip with the cub scout unit at the Newport News Park, a huge chunk of public park land a little ways west of home down I-64. Even though the wind had the lake shut down, dashing our canoeing plans (and caused some disconcerting creaking from the trees above my tent), we had a nice time sitting around the campfire, making sugar napalm toasting marshmallows, and trying to spot animals (saw a bunch of dear, raptors, toads, and a quick little lizard).

And lesson learned: Want to keep a pack of pre-teens occupied and engaged for the better part of an evening? Hand ’em a case of MREs for dinner. For the record, the beef stew isn’t completely terrible, but stay away from the “strawberry banana dairy shake”; way too sweet.

Upon returning home Sunday, I had a decently productive afternoon, taking care of a whole pile of chores, making a good (but probably a little too spicy) Thai peanut chicken dish, getting a nice long bike ride in (after applying the lessons learned from this book toward getting the drivetrain and gearing dialed in properly), and finally watching the replacement copy of The Hurt Locker from Netflix – good movie, worthy of the accolades it received.