Dios Los Cria, y Ellos Se Juntan

What a crazy week of vacation it has indeed been! Would you like to hear about a few of the things that happened? Some amusing anecdotes, perhaps? Settle back, then, dear reader, and be amazed at the glory that is this life:

We went to Brad and Betsy's on Friday night for dinner and a movie. The kids watched their movie while we ate dinner (it was "Tuck Everlasting"), and made use of B&B's freshly-cleared-out dining room. They just re-did their kitchen / living room and turned it into a gorgeous space, with vaulted ceilings and the coolest concrete counter you've ever seen. Perfect for drinking manhattans and watching someone else cook while simultaneously having conversations with him, hoping not to distract him so much that he cuts himself. (I was not entirely successful there.) So the dining room had been the receiving ground for all the detritus of the renovation process, and they cleared it out and made an actual dining room just for us. It was super - lasagna and salad, followed by the kids all trundling off to bed. It was a sleepover, you see - T's second one ever, the first also having happened at B&B's. They piled up in their beds and were only heard from once, and that only from the boys, who were still wired at 11:00. But they only came down once. When I went up to see T off and smooch her goodnight, she was in her sleeping bag up on B&B's daughter's bed, being read to by the light of her little lamp, and looked about as happy as a little girl can possibly be. "The only way to make this better for T," I said at the time, "would be if she were actually literally floating on a cloud." M (the daughter) is soooooo good with T - she's in 3rd grade, in Q's class, and is preternaturally smart and mature in just about every way. (I may have said this before, but I've told Brad that Mae makes me feel like she should be in a white room somewhere, surrounded by men in hazmat suits asking her about the future.) And when T comes over, M devotes all of her energy to her, never seeming put out or bored at all. T is treated like an absolute equal by the person she looks up to most on Earth. You can all but feel her little personality firming up and growing stronger under the growth light that is this lovely girl's attention.

W, Brad and Betsy's son, is in 2nd grade, and he and Q get on gangbusters. They make lego castles and weapons and charge around the house scheming and plotting. It's pure boy time, and they are pretty quintessentially boy-oriented. Though we were joking about how Q and M's relationship is going to change (or not) as they get older. We were imagining M's friends saying, "Oh, he's so dreeeeamy!", and M saying, "What?! Him?!" "Oh, yes, wouldn't you love to see him after school some time?" "He was at my house last night. He slept over." It's going to be a lot of fun.

The adults then settled in to watch "The Dark Knight", and I will say this: Heath Ledger will have deserved to win the Oscar he is no doubt about to win this very same evening. (We aren't watching - though I just now realized that Janneke, who is pretty clueless about the goings on in the outside world sometimes ("What? A chimp attacked someone? Where? CONNECTICUT?!?!"), might not know they're on, and called out to her to inform her. So while it is true that "we" are not watching, she herself scrambled for the remote the moment I reminded her.

But "The Dark Knight" is a long movie, and we were driving home at 12:30, which, for a couple of broken-down fuddy-duddies like us (OK: I'm the only one who's broken down), is aaaawfully late. So I didn't roll in to pick the kids up until 8:45 or so the next morning. Brad made me a waffle in his pajamas (that is to say, he was wearing his pajamas - he made it in a waffle iron), and I managed to round them up without any major scenes and head off to what I thought was going to be a day on the slopes.

But Janneke didn't like the wind speed, and since the wind chill was somewhere around 15, and she hates being on a chair lift in the wind, we called it off and went skating instead. Long sharp things on restrictive boots, frozen water, constant danger of falling - Pretty much the same deal.

And I didn't bring the camera, for which I am still kicking myself. We had almost no one on the ice to interfere with us, compared to other free skates we've done, and wound up diong a "Family hug!", as Tess will call them, in the middle of the rink, slowly turning circles on skates with our arms around each other, and I said to myself, "Boy, there should be a Flip video camera on the ice below us right now." "Yep," I had to agree. "You are a dumbass." "Damn right you are," I replied, and bit my own tongue clean through.

And it only got worse from there - Tess fell asleep in the car on the way home, which would have been gorgeous on film, but not until after we'd gone through the CAR WASH...! Damn. That would've been the movie to end all movies. (Though, judging by the number of views on the sledding video I put up the other day, not too many people would ever have seen it.)

Skating concluded, we came home to tune in to what has become a 5:00 PM Saturday tradition: Lawrence Welk reruns on PBS. Now, what educational value Lawrence Welk might have is not something I care to get into - I simply enjoy being transported back to the age of 8. Or younger - this one was from 1971, and the theme was "The Oscars". We got renditions of "Georgie Girl", "Raindrops Keep Fallin'", the theme from "Love Story"...It was funny for us, and fun for the kids. And then supper, horsin' around, and to bed.

This morning we had guests: Mark and Ronadh, and their boy O, who's in Q's grade and is really his oldest friend; and Denise and Pete, whose son C is in T's daycare room. Ronadh and Pete are both Irish (though Pete's from Northern Ireland, so passport-wise, they don't match up so much), and Mark is from upstate New York, which, in terms of accent, culture, and general temperament, is pretty much the Midwest. Janneke and Denise, meanwhile, are both cloying busybodies. So everybody had someone to relate to. The kids settled in to watch "Meet the Robinsons" while the rest of us gabbled in the dining room. Not as nicely redone as Brad and Betsy's, but nice nonetheless. One of these days we'll re-do the bejeezus out of this place, and then, hoo boy, you just wait. They'll be writing about our new kitchen and dining room in their blog that nobody reads.

And it might be happening piecemeal anyway, this renovation - because one by one, all our appliances seem to be giving up the ghost. The refrigerator is leaking, the microwave died, and the washing machine won't put up with super-size loads anymore. It also consistently won't allow you to do "cold-cold" cycles. But then, a few days later, it'll go back to letting you do it. And it suddenly strikes me that that's the sort of stuff that started to happen around the house in "The Exorcist" before the fit really started to hit the shan, isn't it? Oh, well. We had a good run. And we might be able to head it off, since Ronadh and Mark turned us on to this guy in the area who calls himself the Appliance Doctor or some such. He comes to your house and fixes what needs fixin', and his minimum fee is $40 or so. Probably very much worth it, because between the skis and the skiing and the other necessities we haven't been able to live without, it's shaping up to be a lean month. Wouldn't really enjoy throwing a refrigerator on the credit card right now.

This afternoon, Q took off with O and family to cavort and go to a free two-hour baseball clinic put on by Williams College. He had decided not to play this spring, but who knows, he might be feeling the itch. Though, by the sound of things, he wasn't exactly encouraged - we asked him how it had gone, and he said he'd gotten out every time he came up to bat. "But it was to get other people to score," he gamely added. Then at 6:00, he trooped off for the weekly pickup soccer game at the elementary school gym.

I didn't stick around to watch. Far better that way - all I do is get frustrated watching him not play up to his potential. So I remove myself and let nature take its course. When I came back to pick him up around 7:15, I saw him score a goal, and he told me afterward that he'd had 7 assists and that one goal. He seemed very happy, so I fought down the urge to point out the things I had noticed in the five minutes I did watch him...Man, sometimes I feel myself doing these things around him - criticizing too much, seeing the negative everywhere - and I think, "This kid is screwed." But in the end, he's tougher than I am. I think he's going to pull through.

Spring soccer coming up...so I'll have to get some kind of tranquilizer prescribed by April, when the games start. Or self-medicate. Schlitz should work nicely.

Speaking of games: March 14th is Team Trivia- and we have awful, awful news: Ronadh can't make it. That's the night of the final performance of Innish, the Irish dance and music group she belongs to. So we're going to be a man down when we try for an unprecedented 4th consecutive title. Janneke bumped into the organizer the other day, and she was very enthusiastically reminding Janneke of the date. "Don't worry," she said, "we've already decided not to give you guys any more robes if you win."

"If". Ha.

OK, I'm going to go pretend to do something responsible for a while. Got to keep up appearances, don't you know. Just like the way I drive off every morning at 6:15 and then spend the day sleeping in the park. It's not easy, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make for Janneke's peace of mind.

'Bye!

But before we go - a bonus track, as it were:



Found this picture. It was a candidate for our Christmas card, but somehow got lost in the shuffle. Glad I found it, though - it's nicer than I remember it.