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It must be difficult, having a birthday less than a week before Christmas, but I have to say, it was nice for me, whose birthday it isn’t, to have a break from the holiday rush and have a chance to celebrate something totally unrelated to what’s going on in the malls and shops. And as today was Mom’s birthday, we all got together at John and Suzanne’s for the traditional taco dinner. It kind of breaks up the inexorable march toward December 25 and beyond.
First, though, I had to put in a full day of actual work, because I’ve been either (a) too distracted, or (2) too busy to get much done this week. Or last week or the week before, as far as that goes. Then I had to drive through the rush hour traffic the few blocks to the party locale. Needless to say, that didn’t alleviate my stress. But once I got there and got settled and got past the first assault of the children, each of whom had something incredibly important to tell me rightthisminute, I was fine.
D.J. was fixing the train that goes around the bottom of the Christmas tree, although I got the feeling some of the fixing was necessary because of his enthusiastic engineering itself. Dakota looked me in the eye and told me a story about a scorpion that got run over by a train. “Did it die?” he asked, and when I said no he said, “Yes it did.”
Kylie invented a game with the hall light switch. She’d turn it off and say, “Good night!” And then she’d turn it back on and say, “Good morning!” She also insisted that I was in her way. Wherever I stood, she’d say, “You’re in my way.” And I’d move, and she’d say it again. Somehow she had me moving all over the house, and I never managed to get out of her way. Funny, that.
Aiden was busy supervising what everyone else was doing, so he didn’t pay much attention to me at first. Later, he asked me help him get all of his toy cars out of the box and line them up. He’s very big on (a) quantity, and (2) order, so having a lot of toy cars, and keeping them all straight in orderly are a matter of high priority with him. He asked me to tell him a story, so I started, “Once upon a time, there were three reindeer.”
I’m not sure where I was going with the story, but he helped me out. “One of them got run over,” he said. There seems to be some preoccupation with things of that nature in that family. So I told him I guessed there were only two reindeer, but then we got called to dinner, so that was the end. “The end,” he announced. |
