Tennis, anyone?

Thanks to our friend Mike, we saw some great tennis this weekend. His company was sponsoring a tennis tournament at SMU and several well-known pros were there. Lee and Ellie met Anna Kournakova on Saturday afternoon while my mom and I were at the St. Thomas mother's association market. I got there just as Anna was leaving the meet and greet party so I didn't get any one-on-one time with her like Lee and Ellie did. We had great box seats for the match - right at mid-court. We watched a mixed doubles match with Anna and then a match between Jim Courrier and Ferreira. Ellie was good the entire match, but right at the end as Courrier raised his racket to serve, it was pin-drop silent and Ellie let out a "Whhheeeeeeee!". Courrier stopped his serve and looked right at us. He knew it was her making the noise because there was nobody in the tables to the left of us. I should have been mortified, but I couldn't stop laughing. I stopped Courrier after the match to apologize and Mike got his autograph for Ellie. Mike recorded the match and watched it when he got home. He fast forwarded to the "incident" and said the announcer calling the match said in a hushed voice, "...Courrier to serve... Courrier stops to look in the stands... aaaaannnnd Courrier serves". We returned on Sunday for more tennis and Courrier went on to win the entire tournament and took home $75,000 for his efforts. Something is telling me I should have played tennis.

Our other big fun this past week was attending a Jason Mraz concert. I had been looking forward to it for months and was a little disappointed. He sounded good, but I can't stand people throwing politics in my face. I don't spend money to have a celebrity give me his views - I spend money so he'll stand up on stage and play his little guitar and sing. I'm so over it all. I would have been fine with him had he not created a stained glass window backdrop during the song "Live High" and overlaid the face of Obama on Jesus' face. It was too much. Obama is not Jesus. At all. Maybe he's a half-witted community organizing version of Robin Hood who thinks it's okay steal money from someone who her worked her butt off to get a bachelors and masters in engineering only to give that money to people who illegally crossed our borders or won't get off welfare, but that's as much as I'll give him credit for. But Jesus? Spare me. So we left.

Lee also caught an (un)lucky break this weekend - he tore the ACL in his right knee... or so we thought at first, which would have meant surgery. But we found out today that it was more of an up-and-down tear rather than a side-to-side so he may not have to have surgery after all. That's the lucky part. He's limping around and is a lot of pain, but the doctor that will go away and he'll have to do some physical therapy.

Last night, we attended a Halloween party at Lakewood. We met Jenny, Brandt, and Garrett there. Garett is about 4 months older than Ellie and is such a doll. When we arrived, I took Ellie in a bathroom to dress her in her costume - the pink poodle. She's had it on twice before, but decided two times was enough. She started screaming immediately when I took it out of the bag. I almost had to hold her down to get it on her. All of this while she was crying in this guttural voice, "Mama! Noooooooo!". It was very dramatic. This little Hispanic cleaning lady watched it all unfold and I felt like an A+ parent. She calmed down after I got the costume on her.

The six of us ate dinner and then went on a hayride around the golf course. On the hayride, Brandt asked Garrett if he would give Ellie a kiss, and he leaned over and planted one on her. There was also a "Monster Mash" with dancing inside. All of the kiddos were running around having a great time. One little girl was dressed as Elmo and Ellie couldn't get over her. She pointed and screamed, "Elmo! Elmo! Elmo!". I discovered that if you want to be treated like a celebrity at Halloween, dress up as Elmo. We're trick-or-treating tomorrow night. I can't wait to take her from house to house and let all of our neighbors see her. It will be much different than last year!