Wednesday 15 December 2010

Caught in the crossfire of childhood and stardom.

Well you wore out your welcome with random precision,
Rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver, you seer of visions,
Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!
The whisper-war this afternoon was quashed by Lochlan, who leveled a stunning reminder to Caleb that it was just fine if Ruthie wanted to wear her favorite uh..very casual shirt to her Christmas concert. She's almost twelve. She needs to make decisions like this. She needs to be considered for input into her own life.

Snort.

I will be DAMNED if I let Lochlan and Caleb spend the next thirty years debating every single thing she ever does but it was nice to see one of them refuse to take it any further, opting to not engage in negative energy. Especially today.

I love hearing the children sing and dance their way through performances. I love the fact that they've made new, close friends and have fun at their new school. It's a safe place. It's a good place. Ruth played with the school band as well, so we were treated to multiple performances and both Ruth and Henry came home exhausted and elated.

I love to watch Caleb's face as he goes in expecting to add more fuel to his private-boarding-school fire and comes away with a renewed understanding of just how perfect it is for the children here because this school was chosen carefully. So carefully that the house was an afterthought, a stroke of pure luck as we chose to do things backwards on purpose.

So far so good, hey?

Speaking of backwards, Ben is off for the holidays and taking his own monstrously beautiful time to decompress. We spent a good hour at the post office today, attempting to fit all of the boxes my family sent into the car. Three tries, it took.

You would drive a tiny car around over a big truck if your gas cost $1.36 a litre as well, and frankly my trunk is a little crowded for winter. I have a shovel, a snow brush/scraper, jumper cables, kitty litter, granola bars, bungee cords, the big x-jack for actually changing a tire, over the stupid j-shaped thing that came with the car, and the cloth bags I use for grocery shopping, since I mostly forget them unless I keep them in the car.

Did I mention my car is tiny? Who cares? It has almost three hundred horsepower and really you're still marveling that people might willingly pay that for gas, aren't you?

I figured. It's okay.

Anyway, we dropped off the boxes and went back out and had lunch at KFC. For some reason vacation=chicken to Ben or maybe it's just comfort/reward food so since he's mentioned it three times in three weeks, off we went today. I had a big crunch sandwich and almost had to spend the afternoon trying to fit MYSELF into the car. If you don't know the big crunch story then I should probably tell it. When I was pregnant with Ruth I lived on big crunch sandwiches, mostly because they were one of the very few food items I could keep down. (Here is not the part where I do not tell you how many pounds I gained during that pregnancy because dear lord no one needs to hear that, now, do they?)

Let's just say it all turned out fine. I watched my little girl and my little boy (a worse pregnancy by FAR, made better only by orange juice) sing their guts out this afternoon and I figure the children got all of their talent from the chickens and the oranges because they put the rest of us to shame.