Christmas stories

Christmas just isn’t quite Christmas when you’re not at home.

But it’s pretty good. Family is great. My dad looked pretty good. He does sleep a lot, and he can’t hear much even with his hearing aids in, but he could have been a lot worse. Mr. Social, he's not. But never has been. Pretty much everyone else was sick, but we managed to avoid catching it. Babies were adorable and fun. Nothing like watching babies run around the house. SOOO cute! And the 4 year olds had their testy moments, but were mostly really very good with each other and us! Thanks to big sis, there was lots of cookie baking.

We did take the pop-up down there and parked at a pretty darn nice RV lot. Close to the bathrooms (very important when all you’ve got is a pop-up!) and clean showers. The heater worked very nicely the entire time. No complaints. I thought it would be kind of awful, but it wasn’t bad at all. I don’t suppose I’d have wanted to be in that close quarters the whole time, but for sleeping – it was just fine.

Cute moments:

A. telling his aunt he didn’t have any shoes. Or a sweatshirt, either. This was the day after he’d told his older cousin that he’d been forced to sell all his videos. Except one. Roly Poly Ollie. Poor child. Poor neglected child. We found out later that not only did the family still own all their videos, they had never owned a Roly Poly Ollie one! I think there is a future in storytelling, if the government gig doesn’t pan out. Come to think of it – it may play very nicely into that government job!

Sparked no doubt by the talents of that same cousin, author and performer of the catchy and inimitable “Snow is Slippery”, and inspired by an actual acknowledgement of the Christmas story, we spent a trip back to the trailer entertained by Little K and her new composition called “Mary and Jofus”. It went something like this:

“Mary and Jofus, Mary and Jofus, Mary and Jofus and Jesus too.
Mary and Jofus, Mary and Jofus, Mary and Jofus and Jesus too.
And the baby is asleep. Mary and Jofus, Mary and Jofus. And Jesus too.”

I’m suspicious that A. planted the seed. But I did love the “Jofus” part. I’m told when I was a little one, I used to call Mary’s companion “Jane Sofas”, which is probably 3 year old for “Saint Joseph”.

Speaking of words and the passage of time – we were speaking of that weren’t we? Every day words come out more and more clearly. I’m missing the little toddler mispronounciations all the time. During this trip, we went from “lipsops” to a very deliberate “lipstick”. And it was only a mere few weeks ago that we got “Honey Bunches of OATS” instead of “Honeyvunches a boats”. (But that was totally understandable – it started out a very confusing “sim-mon-a-boats” I think she thought it had cinnamon somewhere in its title.) So I’ll enjoy the “Jofus” moments when they come. There - see – there was a point there after all!

Little Ben decided that I was a wonderful snuggler and climbed up into my lap time after time to get some snuggles. Does that kid know how to wrap an aunt around her little finger or what???!! And I got lots of blown kisses from great nephew L. Can’t get much cuter than a couple of 1 year olds playing the adults like violins.

So, we got back safe and sound despite very heavy winds and rains on the last 90 minutes of our trip (and it was still my turn to drive), which also coincidentally was around midnight after I’d gotten up at 5:30am to take DDD back to the airport. Needless to say, I was super tired, but that weather scared me enough that falling asleep just wasn’t much of a concern. We blew around the Altamont pass a little, passed through some very heavy rains and hydroplaned our share of the road. But the trailer stayed hitched and behaved itself quite nicely despite the challenges thrown at it.

Hope your holidays were wonderful as well.