While composing my Best Of post yesterday, I was shocked by how many bad things actually happened last year – hospital stays! broken arms! choking incidents! close calls with cars! – and yet the year still felt like a GOOD one. The things that make life happy are often such little things, things that are hard to write about, while bad things carry such drama with them.
We don’t have big plans for tonight, but we are going to do our usual New Year’s Eve routine of movies and appetizers and board games, which is pleasant and feels like us. I don’t often yearn for more excitement in my life, since excitement is so often well-packaged trouble and I’ve always had the inner life of a cautious 75 year old. The idea of getting dressed up and spending New Year’s Eve drunkenly kissing someone else’s husband is a little bit foreign to me, and besides, I have five ZILLION pine needles to vacuum up and that will probably take all day. I am so boring.
See how boring I am? I put this little guy right to sleep:
AW! That’s my parent’s new puppy – their old dog suffered some terrible fate RIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS, killed either by wolves or an irate neighbour – and so the new puppy was around for Christmas, sleeping all soft bellied and warm on laps at Christmas dinner. Of course, the puppy made my ovaries light up like the Christmas tree and I kept saying to my husband "OH HONNNEY, LOOOOOK AT THE BAAAAAAAABY!"which made him back away, slowly and cautiously.
Speaking of babies – whenever we go out in public as a family these days, we get lots of weird jokey comments from people, like the following:
"Doncha guys know where those come from?"
"I’m guessing you don’t own a tv, right?"
"WHOA! You must have your hands full!"
"I think you guys need a more comfortable bed."
And meanwhile, we only have THREE CHILDREN. Lots of people have three kids! LOTS! And our children aren’t triplets or very closely spaced AND they’re extremely well-behaved (well, reasonably well-behaved), so I guess some people just get all giddy if you have more than one kid. Many of the bloggers I read have many more than three children, and I would love for all of those moms to visit me and then we’ll go out for lunch with our 50 children in tow, which I expect would leave the local wiseacres mercifully silent for once.
The only problem with having three kids is that most recipes are scaled for four people, which means that if I want to feed everyone, I have to use my limited math skills to figure recipes out. Oh, and we can’t all fit in the average vehicle. And we’re tired all the time. But that’s it, pretty much – three kids are a nice number, a pleasant crowd on Christmas morning and a lovely amount of trouble, our hands and our hearts full.