I think L suspects her nice-to-naughty ratio might have taken a dip recently and she needs a last minute "nice" bump before the final reckoning and accounts are closed. She's been helping with the dishes ("I'm very good at washing!") and making cookies, and she even pretended to take her nap this afternoon.
We generally reserve our barbecue sauce for ribs or chicken, but on occasion, it gets slathered generously all over our kids. I'm not exactly sure how it happened. I didn't even know there was a bottle of sauce around to be had. I only know we weren't looking for about a minute and that was 59 seconds too long. To get a straight story over here you need a CSI unit, but the best we can tell using our primitive investigative techniques* is that N was the initial perpetrator, though it seems he had a willing accomplice.
Technically I've been a dad for close to four and a half years now, but last night I entered Dad-dom on a new level. L had her first preschool Christmas pageant a her church school and I crossed that threshold of isolated home-centered living to the wild, untamed, thoroughly uncivilized realm of school functions that I expect will envelope our family for many years to come. Stacy has ventured in and out of this world for several months now, but this way my voyage of discovery.
There's something about getting 75 five-and-under-year-olds in one room with their assorted parents, grandparents, siblings and sycophants that probes into every extreme of the human social dynamic. The event pushes quite a wide range of buttons. There is, admittedly, the unbridled gush of pride at my little angel's performance, though she sang very little and sucked her mouth into a fish-face an awful lot. She was clearly superior to all the other talentless hacks. (But I reluctantly realize we need to keep the rest of those miserable kids in school and off our streets.) There are definitely the warm-hearted, misty-eyed moments of peace, joy and love, except when that obnoxious little punk on the riser in front of her would sway from side to side and block my pictures. (I wanted to throw a shoe at him.)
But then there are the less honey-dewed aspects. Namely the parents. If the world were full of people like Stacy and I, what a marvelous place it would be. Everyone would sit down and stop pushing and let us move unhindered into the best photo-taking spots so I could get all my under-exposed shots. They would be reasonable and tolerant when I stood up in front of them to better watch L's group sing. They wouldn't nudge and jostle and thrust their kids in front of mine when I'm expecting the preschool teacher's full attention to get pictures with my precious darling. If everyone was as patient and thoughtful as I am, and if they only recognized that I don't have the time or patience to wait in line all night to get cookies for my kids or punch for myself, how pleasant things would be. Why can't the rest of the howling, clamoring, kicking, biting mob be as unselfabsorbed as Stacy and I are?
The performance was a mercifully short one, but nothing could have been short enough for N, who, confined to a church pew, paced about like a caged tiger, pulling out and dropping every Bible and hymnal to see how many pages could be bent when they hit the floor cover-open. (Once again, the evil influence of all those other animal children was clearly responsible.) After the conclusion of the magnum opus, the hoard of unlikely lambs and angels herded into a rather small fellowship hall for cookies, punch and more parental pushing and shoving.
Miss Yoshie and Miss Katrine, L's preschool teachers.
As we walked back to our car I contemplated this new strange world, getting a little nostalgic for all those good times a week or so ago. I was somewhat pleasantly lost in my thoughts of life and change and how we need to accept with good grace all the changes that befall us, at least until that other parent in the pretentious minivan pulled out of their parking space right in front of us and I had to yell at them to &#*$-well look where they were #$&%*ing going.
My timing is impeccable.
The fact that today was the day I took off to go to Disney will not go down in history. It will not be noted by historians, nor will journalists chronicle its occurrence. (Apart from the humble offerings of yours truly.) What will go down in the books is that today was the day that the Arctic Storm of the Century descended in all its chilly and dreary gloom on the greater L.A. basin. In my years in Los Angeles I don't remember a more miserable day.
At first we were not dismayed. The rain would keep the crowds away! And how bad could it get? We were in Southern California, after all. Ten minutes of vague spitting and it would be done, right? We drove out, paid our exorbitant sum, parked and caught the tram into the park, all the while in a cold, steady drizzle. We hadn't gotten ten feet from the tram when the gale-force winds whipped Stacy's umbrella inside-out. I suppose that was an omen of warning that we were supposed to heed carefully. We kept going.
If it hadn't been established before, the tone for the day was firmly set within 15 seconds of actually entering the park. L ran from the gate right up to a landscaped lawn with a huge floral Mickey, trudging in the process straight through a puddle a couple inches deep. Instantly her shoes looked like recoveries from the Titanic. The hem of her pantlegs had dragged through the bilge and immediately the water wicked its way up her pantleg all the way to her knee as we stood there and watched in stunned horror. It took L a few seconds to notice, but she eventually did. Unfortunate. We usually get an hour or two in the park before the crying starts.
Within a half-hour or so N was an unprecedented shade of lavender. He didn't fuss much because his frozen shiver attacks kept stifling the cries. L kept bumping into people and things because her raincoat hood was pulled so tightly over her head that her eyes were warped and she had zero peripheral vision. Stacy and I were walking around with the seats of our pants dark, wet, and heavy from sponging up all the water in the drainage ditch-like seats on the tram ride. That sinking feeling of "this just isn't going to work" came pretty early. It was resolutely ignored.
Of all the little justifications and logical contortions we subjected ourselves to in order to drum up the will to go, one actually did hold water, so to speak. The crowds were indeed light. (They were also wet, but that goes without saying.) We were able to sprint from ride to ride with out so much as a two minute wait. Generally we would walk in the entrance and move immediately into the ride cart, where our bottoms would get to soak up another half-cup or so of water from the drainage ditch benches. Stacy and I both agreed, the best attraction was Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. At the very end of it there is a thirty second descent into a faux purgatory where lots of cute and cuddly minions of Disney-Satan wave cute little pitchforks at you. While interesting from a theological perspective, we had a more physiological attraction, because for those thirty seconds you were treated to the blast-furnaces of Disney-hell and you were able to warm up just a tad before being flung back out the doors into the horizontally streaming rain.
They say that if you fall into a snowbank and can't get out, that for some reason you start to feel warm before you die. That was encouraging because it meant that none of us were anywhere near death the entire day. And it was an entire day. You have to understand that there is only one person in the world cheaper than myself -- that would be my Dad, but aside from him and me, the third runner up in the cheapness ranks is my wife, so there wasn't a whole lot of chance that we would be leaving the park without several hours of enforced fun under our soggy belts, unless it was because we got forcibly removed by a snowplow. I figured that until we saw all the Disney animals pairing up and heading over to an ark perched on Space Mountain, we were good. Over the next couple of hours we learned all of Disney's hot spots -- and yes I meant that literally.
Mommy from the merry-go-round.
Again, my timing is excellent.
OK, that's a little better.
When we finally got to the car and stripped the kids down and tossed them into the pajamas that we had (in a rare glimmer of foresight) packed with us, we cranked up the engine and cranked on the heat. The over-the-windshield console immediately kicked on and shouted those numbers at me that immediately filled my soul with guilt and horrible-father conviction. The outside temperature was 40ºF.
Sleigh bells ring, are you listening? Actually that's just the smoke alarm. Stacy's baking again.
N follows behind, removes said ornament and leaves it (for some unknown reason) in a pile in the kitchen. Actually in the time since we wrapped up the decorating phase, we've had a steady decline in ornamentation, as L is no longer propping up the ornament supply and N continues to trickle it away.
Santa happen to drive through our neighborhood one evening this week. I was working late, but Stacy and the kids went out to see him. L informed Stacy that she was going to ask Santa for an Ariel (a.k.a. The Little Mermaid) coloring book. When she finally got her turn to ask for her economic bail-out package she went deer-in-the-headlights, or in her case stiff-with-two-fingers-in-her-mouth. After a suitable amount of prompting on Santa's part and awkward dead silence on L's, Santa suggested that she "write it all up in a letter." She couldn't high-tail it home fast enough. When I got home from work Stacy showed me two exquisitely folded pieces of scribbled-on construction paper, each with a pound and a half of scotch tape. L had thoughtfully decided to write Santa about all the Ariel products that N wanted too.
Steve doesn't think he'll ever summon enough Christmas spirit to forgive Uncle Kenny for the Dancing Santa gift. To make matters (much) worse, the kids love it
