First, if you are local and you have not yet seen my 101 Ideas for Holiday Family Fun, well, you are missing out. It is a majestic compilation o’ fun, if I do say so myself. It is actually well over 101 items, if you wanted to take the trouble to count, but the point is, there is plenty to do. You’re welcome. Incidentally, whenever I am particularly pleased with a KidsOutAndAbout resource, I tend to share it on my events page, so keep an eye out.
Hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving! We hosted Thanksgiving for our 4th year in a row. It was a smaller crowd than usual–only eleven people–and the small numbers along with the cancelled tournament made prep low-stress. Possibly a little too low-stress, since it was only, like, an hour before we ate that I thought, hmm, maybe I should count how many napkins I’ve got.
With extra house guests, the girls frequently used our master bathroom. Actually, they frequently use the master bathroom, anyway, which I wouldn’t mind so much if they were any good at it. For example, they will leave items in the bathroom after they’ve used it: a crumpled up pair of underwear by the toilet, special face scrubs in the shower. Sometimes this is extra-annoying. Recently a new razor appeared next to my razor in the shower, and so then I realized that I had no idea which razor was mine, and my choice was to start with a fresh razor, cross-contaminate, or give up shaving for the winter.
Or this:
My daughters are aware of the fact that we have recycling bins in the house, and yet, they choose to just leave empty bottles in random places. This is part of the ongoing campaign to, as I say, “take it to the next level.” Which they should just totally already be doing. Because when you are leaving empty bottles in my bathroom, you are basically assigning me the task of carrying the bottles downstairs, rinsing them out, and putting them into the recycling bin. Which ends up going one of three ways: on days when I’m feeling diligent, I actually point all this out (“Did you know that you can carry these downstairs and rinse them out yourself?” “Of course I do, Mom!” “Well, can you please show me that you know, by actually doing it?” “Auugh, MOM!”), or I can passive-aggressively move the bottles into someone’s bedroom (Oh, don’t think that I wouldn’t be that immature and petty, because I absolutely will. My favorite is leaving fruit pits in my daughters’ beds.), or I can (sigh) just do it myself. Which I know I shouldn’t, but it is the path of least resistance, so it happens more often than not. It’s as if these girls think that I am a House Elf. Won’t someone please give me a sock?
The absolute worst, though, is that the girls somehow manage to knock our shower doors out of whack. They are perfectly functional glass doors on a sliding track (you can see them in this post), and I don’t know what the girls do to them, but suddenly they’re un-slide-able, and it becomes, like, a 15-minute handyman’s job for poor Cute W. When we ask what happened, both girls say, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, I wasn’t even in the bathroom,” and that is just ridiculous, because I’ll walk into the room and there’s some acne facial cleanser in the shower and strands of long hairs on the sink and a twist of extra-small skinny jeans on the floor and the freakin’ shower door won’t open. But, okay, yes: that totally must have been Cute W. That is so believable. I’ve gone as far as actually making M walk upstairs with me and into the bathroom to demonstrate in front of me exactly how she opens and closes the shower doors, which she did while rolling her eyes so far into the back of her head that you’d think she was, like, a colt confronted by a rattlesnake. Because in her opinion, in this scenario, I’m the unreasonable one.
Speaking of unreasonable, I was asking my family what I needed to buy at the grocery recently, and they all said that we definitely need more fruit. And so I pulled one container out of the fridge and set it next to the room-temperature-fruit basket, and I said, “Really? Do we really need more fruit?”
Yes, that’s what we actually had in the house at the time. They all looked at me and looked at the fruit and said, yes, of course, there was a clear under-representation of berries, zero apples, and not enough bananas to get us through the day. Have I mentioned that my family has a Fruit Problem? Cute W and I have a running joke going because he claims that I made the girls addicted to water because I am always toting a water bottle with me. I say: hydration is important. And healthful. And thrifty. This fruit obsession, on the other hand, is all from Cute W, and yes, fruit is good for you, but jeepers, all things in moderation, and it sure as heck runs up a higher tab than refilling your water bottle at the faucet. But of course we are #blessed to have the means to purchase and keep plentiful produce. Which is also a running joke at our house, because while we are supremely fortunate in many things, we aren’t the most spiritual crew, so Cute W will say, “hashtag blessed” about something and the girls will groan about his dorky joke. But the truth is we are blessed, at least by the dictionary.com “fortunate or favored” definition, even if Cute W denies any supreme or sacred intelligence or deity who has consciously showered us with favor, and even though the girls have repeatedly told us that we are absolutely forbidden to say the word “hashtag” or type “#” into any sort of device for any reason whatsoever because it only reveals our woeful ignorance of social media everything. (We gleefully ignore their attempted restrictions.) It is true that this partly became a running joke because “#blessed” tends to accompany some of the most insufferable parenting social media posts ever, the kind that Cute W and I avoid. But heck, we are #blessed. In particular, we tend to be blessed with heaps of fruit.
On the topic of produce shopping, here’s what the actual salad section of Hannaford looked like today. Yikes, man. I guess the romaine lettuce has infected everything? I actually have a salad mix in my fridge that contains romaine, and I’d eaten one salad’s worth of it already without becoming ill and dying, so now I’m trying to decide if I should live dangerously and consume the rest of it.
