My Weekend Without Kids...Well, Kinda

This weekend was pretty full (for me anyway) of activities that aren't the norm around our house. It wasn't my intention to pack everything into one weekend, it's just the way it turned out. (And apparently I had much more to say about the weekend than I realized. So this is long.)

On Saturday morning, after getting breakfast for everyone and getting the boys dressed, I left to get my hair cut/colored. It had been atleast a couple of months so my hair was feeling desperate. I love my stylist. She always does a great job with my hair and we have fun chatting (not one bit of gossiping!!!) while she does her best to make me look presentable. Which we all know is a tough task, but she takes it on rather well. I usually can't get out of there in under an hour and a half when I have everything done, so Keith had a lot of fun with the boys at home. (Well, it would have been fun had Cooper taken a nap that lasted longer than 20 minutes...)

When I got home, Keith's parents were at our house, ready to spend the rest of the day with the boys so we could get out of the house. Excluding an evening when Cooper was 2 weeks old, this was our first time to leave him for an extended period of time. Not that I have a problem doing this, we just don't have any babysitting options in our immediate area (scratch that, we do have options, but I save them for emergencies. I have a problem with asking my friends with kids to take on my 2 kids just so we can go see a movie. Especially when one of my kids is still too little to run off and play with the others. So I save calling these friends for if/when something comes up that I desperately need their help.)

Keith and I had accumulated several things that needed to be returned at a variety of places. I loathe making returns and exchanges at stores. It is such a pain, but everything needed to be returned. One was a vacuum cleaner where the on/off switch was completely broken off while it was still new in the box. So we made our rounds with the returns, while also buying Christmas presents here and there if something caught our eye. We ate lunch at Texas Roadhouse, which is our go-to restaurant. We love it! Then we went to see "Couples Retreat". Hilarious!! We love Vince Vaughn and he was really good in this movie. Again, not the cleanest movie, so no official endorsement from me. But it was still funny.

After the movie we went to Best Buy and bought a few more Christmas presents, then went to Cavenders. This is a western clothing shop, for those of you who have never heard of the place. Keith had a pair of pants given to him for his birthday (in JULY!) that were bought there and he needed to return them because they were the wrong size. He found a shirt to replace them and then insisted that I buy a pair of cowboy boots. I've never owned any in my entire life and ever since we've known each other, Keith has always wanted me to get a pair (along with a John Deere t-shirt and a cowboy hat, but let's take this one step at a time.) I dug through the boots on clearance (I refuse to pay $300 for a pair of boots I will only wear occasionally) and found some that I really like. So I'm now an owner of a pair of cowboy boots after almost 31 years of life on this Earth. *And all the Texans gasped in horror at that statement.*

We then headed to the place we dreaded going, but knew it was unavoidable if we were going to make an attempt at more Christmas shopping. Toys R Us. This is NOT the place to go on a Saturday night. Apparently everyone with kids and nothing else better to do goes there and lets their kids run wild and play with all the toys in the store. I'm pretty sure it's a STORE and not a playground, but whatever. We had balls bouncing all around us down the aisles. Insanity. We did find a couple of things for Garrett for Christmas and checked out a few more, so I don't feel as if this was a trip wasted.

By this point, it was 6:00 pm. I hadn't given Keith's parents any bedtime instructions for the boys and since Cooper typically starts his bedtime routine around 7pm, we figured we should head on home. Thankfully the boys did well for their grandparents, so that was a plus.

Sunday morning, we went to church and had great services and Sunday school time. We picked up Sonic burgers and came home to eat and straighten up around the house a little. From lunchtime until 4:00, I stayed busy getting laundry done, making the rest of Cooper's bottles for the evening, starting supper, and laying out pj's. Because at 4:00, I was headed out of the house for the rest of the evening, leaving Keith to tend to the boys. He's certainly taken care of them by himself many times, but he had never put them to bed by himself. Bedtime in itself is not a big deal, it's the hour or two leading up to it that can be chaotic. Mostly with Cooper.

My reason for abandoning my husband to do bedtime alone was because my friend, Kelli, and I had tickets to a David Cook concert in Dallas. I met her at her house at 4:30 and then we headed to Dallas. We found the concert venue and then drove around downtown to find a good place to eat supper. We decided on an Italian restaurant and had a hilarious time trying to find it again. We parked in a parking garage right on the same block as the restaurant and were totally confused when we came out of the garage that we ended up walking around the entire block before we finally found the restaurant again. I don't think Dallas is necessarily unsafe, but I don't want to make it a habit of walking around downtown after dark. After we finished eating, we managed to find the parking garage without rewalking the whole block, but then we couldn't figure out where the stairs or elevator were, so we just walked up the garage in the driving lane. We're morons.

Let me just add that if you smell urine while walking in a parking garage, be sure to watch your step. Keith said he has seen much worse than that in the parking garage he parks in every day. That's just disgusting. If I'm a homeless person (and I'm assuming it's homeless people doing this. At least I hope it is...), then I would rather find a patch of grass to take care of business than in a parking garage! That's, of course, assuming I was unable to find a public restroom or a shelter's restroom to use.

We managed to find our way back to the concert venue and somehow the line waiting at the door had tripled in length. Thankfully the doors opened pretty soon after getting in line and we moved through all the check points quickly and got about 8 rows from the stage. This venue is standing room only, so it was basically first come first serve as far as your "seat" goes. I haven't been to a lot of concerts in my lifetime. It wasn't something we could afford growing up, then when I was in college, I was more concerned with paying my college tuition and affording food without accumulating a huge amount of student loans that I never went to any concerts. So the majority of the concerts I've been to have been ones that my youth group went to at different times over the years.

So I say all that to say that I had never attended a standing room only concert. First off, it's a very frustrating experience for a person who likes order, like myself. Nobody really has an assigned area. While you would like to think that people would respect your space, they don't. I saw many people push and shove their way through the crowd and they weren't doing it to get back to their friends. Things like that make me so mad! When there was about 20 minutes left in the concert, the lady next to me, shoved her daughter about 2 people in front of me. The same daughter had been hitting me with her purse all night, so while I was irritated that she got in front of me, I was happy to be done with getting beaten up.

(Why, women, would you bring your purse into a standing room only concert where you're only going to have to hold it for 4+ hours???? I put my cell phone, ID (not that I needed it, it was just in case), credit card and some cash into my pockets and hid my purse in the car. If you really think you need to bring makeup in order to touch it up during the concert then I have to call you a moron. It's dark in there. Not to mention the fact that if you're doing it to attempt to impress the singer, as some do, he doesn't give a flying flip about you other than the fact that you paid money to come see him perform. He won't notice your stunning makeup in the midst of an audience of hundreds and think that he needs to meet you. So ditch the purse.)

Back to my story, after the mom shoved her daughter in front of me (and the daughter was at least 21 because she had a drinking wristband on), the mom made a move as if she was going to stand in front of me. All 6 feet tall of her in front of 5'5" me. I used a good placed elbow to keep that from happening. She kept looking down at me as if she was going to intimidate me into moving out of her way. She finally realized that I wasn't intimated by her ridiculous tattoos and moved in front of someone else. RUDE!!

The concert itself was really good. There were 2 opening bands: Green River Ordinance-a band who is from DFW and had lots of local fans in the audience, so that was cool, and The Script-a band from Ireland who actually opened for Paul McCartney when he played at the new Cowboys stadium. I was surprised they would be opening for David Cook after a gig like that, but I certainly don't claim to know how that kind of thing works. Both bands were good, though The Script was probably a little less my style. David Cook and his band were also great. He played quite a few songs off his current record along with 2 songs from before he won American Idol and then he covered "I Just Died in Your Arms" from the 80's.

After the concert, Kelli and I drove around downtown because we were both confused as to how to get back to the road we needed to get to her house. You certainly would not have thought that she drives in Dallas on a regular basis or that I'm somewhat familiar with the city. I should have brought our GPS but it never occured to me. Needless to say, don't ask either of us for directions. And definitely don't let me drive you around Dallas. Unless you need to get to a mall or Keith's office. Those are the only places I'm sure of where I'm going and how to get there.

It was really a fun and busy weekend. I'm sure it will be awhile before I have another one like it, but that's ok. My body needs to recover from the concert.