Lakeland wakes up all early because she knows it's "TV day". She scampers into our room, sticks her face nose-to-nose with my face, yells "MOM!", and the next thing I know, I'm standing in the living room in front of the TV, shivering in my underwear, with the Netflix remote in my hand. She then takes a painstakingly long time to choose a show, (and I really can't blame her, since she only gets to do this once a week) directing me to scroll slowly through season after season of the blazing neon "My Little Pony" titles. It's the part of my weekend that feels sort of like climbing a mountain in soapy flip-flops; never ending and completely maddening.
At some point, I hear myself yelling "Oh my GOD, just PICK ONE" and that startles her enough to make a selection so that I can schlep back to bed. Then I lay in my room and listen once again to "The Fox and the Hound", which she chooses basically every week, while thinking about what we should do for Sunday Family Fun Day.
You might know that Seth works a weekend job as a mover, and most Saturdays, he burns in the ballpark of 6,000 calories carrying the belongings of families to and from a truck. That means that on Sundays, he wants to kind of lay low and have what he calls "a good eating day". He walks around, moaning about his sore muscles and showing off new bruises, while repeatedly rubbing his belly and mumbling "today's gonna be a good eatin' day." (Which often translates to me having a good eatin' day too, though I definitely didn't earn it...all I do on Saturday mornings is attend a one hour fitness class and then go home and take a great big nap.)
I've come to think of these Sunday binges as Sunday Family Fat Day. Eating at a pizza buffet, for example, is exactly the type of place where I have zero self-control; it combines my great need of "getting the most for my money" with my "if it has melted cheese on it, I'll eat it until it's gone" mentality, and all is lost.
One Sunday, a while back, I came up with this brilliant plan to combine Sunday Family Fun Day with Sunday Family Fit Day, and in the spirit of this, asked Seth and Lakeland if they wanted to go to the driving range* and hit a couple buckets of balls. Not exactly a cardio workout, but still, it met my lone criteria, which was to be "active". Lakeland agreed to go in a way that made it seem as if I'd offered her a trip to Disney World, while Seth balked. However, once he was aware of the whole picture - that the driving range serves chicken wings...in buckets - he quickly jumped on board.
The morning was sailing along smoothly until Seth got an even better idea for Sunday Family Fit Day, which was to go ice skating. Perfect! I got all excited, and peeled Lakeland's eyeballs off of the screen just long enough to ask her if she thought that ice skating sounded fun. She did not. She emphatically did not.
Lakeland read the secret message and then picked Emma up, bringing the elf's bow shaped mouth to her own ear and listened, nodding her head in understanding. And then, aloud, Lakeland said "What's that, Emma? OH, you say you want to go golfing? Oh, OK!" Then Lakeland looked right into my eyes and, with that perfect mixture of sweetness and I-am-not-going-to-be-manipulated-by-this-mischievous-elf-or-my-mother, said "Did you hear that mommy? She definitely wants to go golfing."
The next thing I knew, Lakeland had drawn a rebuttal picture of her own self, standing next to Emma, both of them holding golf clubs and smiling. Seth saw Lakeland's drawing on the dining room table and poked so much fun at me for what I thought was a highly clever attempt to get Lakeland to change her mind, that I'm pretty sure he cracked one of my ribs.
So...we went golfing for Sunday Family Fit Day. And we finished off a bucket of chicken wings, because that's what we do...keep traditions, like Sunday Family Fat Day, alive.
* Driving ranges in D.C. are heated, so you can swing away regardless of weather. It's weird.
