Sunday Evenin' Comin' Down

Took both kids to the home of one of Q’s baseball coaches this afternoon for a pool party to celebrate a successful season. Got to know the coaches a little better, a couple of the parents (some of whom are the coaches)…Nice time. Q and T both spent most of the three hours in the pool, playing around, having a ball despite the weather. Which wasn’t especially cold, just not the blazing sauna that makes pools the most fun to be in.

The coach (Coach Rand) also has a game room in his basement, where there’s a ping pong table. So after the pool got old, the boys were downstairs playing, and Q extracted a promise from me that we would play when we got home. I was glad to comply, as our table hasn’t seen nearly enough use lately.

So after supper, he and I went down to play while T set up her usual game in the downstairs bathroom, where she’s the mother and we’re both her children. She sallies forth into the area where we’re playing to bring us snacks and wipe our noses, and call us “Sweetie”. And we submit to being called in to sit down to dinner or lunch or copetín every few minutes. It’s fun.

As we played ping pong, Q’s growing athleticism just leapt up out of him and shocked me. I played with my left hand, inspired by Colton’s dad, who does that to keep it competitive, and it’s really not a contest. He smokes me. I was astonished at some of the amazing, leaning, stabbing gets he would pull out of the air somehow, slicing a ball back across the net to just barely clip the edge on my side, much too far for me to have a shot at…I would laugh and howl at each one, and he would cackle and mime the acrobatics involved again, and we’d launch into another point. After ten minutes or so, he just declared to the world, unable to control himself: “This is so much FUN!”

The game slowed down as the conversation got interesting – he wanted to know more about John Brown, with whom he’s got a growing fascination. I’ve narrated him any number of anecdotes about him now from the biography I got as a gift a year or two ago. Then he wanted more Civil War history – “Something about Wisconsin,” he specified. So I gave him the tale of Ol’ Abe, the bald eagle mascot of a regiment from Wisconsin, bought from an Indian for a sack of corn by one of their recruits as he walked to Madison to muster, how his bunch saw much action during the war and never suffered defeat, hoisting a screaming Abe above them on a perch mounted on a pole with a banner beneath, and how they carried Abe in triumph back to Madison, where he lived the rest of his days in the Governor’s mansion. He positively ate that up.

Back upstairs (T had misreported the time to me, so we ended the game before it was really necessary), T took the game of Mami to greater lengths, tucking us both in atop her own big girl bed and settling down beside us before announcing that it was morning, and that today was a special day because we were going to go swimming at the museum, so we had to pack out swimming trunks and our lunches before we got on the bus. Day after day whizzed by like that – we must have done a week in the space of about fifteen minutes. Q got tired of the game, and left, but I stayed on.

T woke me up yet another bright morning and told me that today was a special day because it was my birthday, and I was going to go to Kindergarten (“jardín de infantes”, which when she says it sounds like “jardín de elefantes”) for the very first time! “Y también,” she informed me, leaning close and nodding confidentially, “you’re a girl.”

“Do you want to wear a skirt, or a dress?”
I found the selection somewhat limited. I pouted. “I want to wear pants.”
She thought for a moment, then cocked her head and leaned in, smiling. “Sparkly pants?”

I played my (her) part, and pretended to be scared. “It’s a new place! I won’t know anyone! The teachers will be new!” And she assured me (her) by saying, “It’s OK, because the teachers are all nice, and you’ll have many friends there, and you’ll make new friends, and your friend Hazel will be there, and she’ll protect you.” So I sauntered around the corner to school in my sparkly pants with a big smile and a wave back over the shoulder, confident that my (her) future was bright, and our path secure, all the way over the horizon into adulthood.

Trembling to resist the temptation to mime, as I went around the door, that I was being grabbed and eaten alive by fanged and horrid creatures.

I do have these evil thoughts – but I’m at least somewhat redeemed in that I don’t actually do these things.

Often.