Leftovers

Some Thanksgiving Weekend Highlights (and Lowlights):

Festive Holiday Decorating: Owen was in a drawing/decorating frenzy in the week leading up to Thanksgiving, specializing in before and after drawings of turkeys - the first drawing of a live happy turkey, the next, always on the same page, of a turkey ready for eating with its eyes marked with an x. He also refused to eat any turkey, basing his claim on a book that was read to him at pre-school involving turkeys who did not want to be eaten and who were holding up "Eat Tuna" signs. A budding vegetarian at age 4?? Is Tofurky in our future???

Blessings Bestowed: We hosted 20 at the house for Thanksgiving. It is a tribute to the organizational skills of Deanna that we were so ready for the party that I was able to take a 1/2 hour nap with Owen just prior to the guests arriving. Unprecedented! Although I avoid the pressure of having to carve a fresh out-of-the-oven Turkey right before dinner by us cooking and carving the turkey the day before and then simply reheating the cut meat in a big pan with gravy, I still have to say Grace. This year, I decided to wing it (pun vaguely intended). Perhaps channeling my inner Pilgrim, this resulted in me using the term "bestow" about a zillion times during the blessing as I rambled on fairly aimlessly about how lucky we all are. Various blessings that I may have mentioned had been bestowed upon those present included, but were not by any means limited to, good health, family, freedom, the food, kids who sleep through the night on occasion, strong cocktails on the odd-night out, HBO, the Bears vague playoff hopes, indoor plumbing, good heads of hair (my dad, not me), Schick Quattro razors (a gift to all the world!), and being lucky enough to live in the same country as David Beckham and Posh (the just-announced reunion of the Jackson Five was but a gleam in some promoter's eye on Thanksgiving, or I undoubtedly would have thrown that in as well). It all gets a bit fuzzy from there but you get the idea.

Thanks for the Smallpox, White Devils: After Thanksgiving Dinner, I read a children's book called The First Thanksgiving to the assorted kids present. Owen had checked it out of the library a couple of weeks earlier and had solemnly informed me that it "was a little sad" in the middle. Indeed it was. In this relatively unsugarcoated version, the kids were informed that there were no Indians in the immediate area when the Pilgrims landed as thousands had been wiped out by a "terrible sickness" brought by English fisherman four years earlier. Three pages later, half the Pilgrims are wiped out during the first winter as they huddled all together in the only building they had had time to construct that first season after landing. It has been a long time, but I don't recall the accounts of the Pilgrims I received as a child being quite so full of grimness and death. If this particularly version doesn't make today's kids thankful for their cushy lives, nothing will!

Doorbusters: For the third year in a row, I participated in a little Black Friday door-busting. This has much more to do with my poor sleep habits than it does with my actually accomplishing any Christmas shopping. If I am going to be awake at 4 a.m., I figure I might as well be awake at a store accomplishing something rather than awake in bed idly hoping I can fall back asleep. Since there is only one day a year that I can actually go to J.C. Penney at 4 a.m., I went. I marveled at the crowds. The lines at every register were 25 people long by 4:30 a.m. The line at Circuit City at 5:40 a.m. was over 150 people long. It took me a bit to warm up, but I eventually did get in the spirit by throwing a few elbows and closing some blockbuster-savings deals. And, I was back in bed by 7:30 a.m. The twins, unfortunately, got up at 7:31.

I'm On My Way to Church, Officer, Honest!: At 9:29 a.m. on Sunday morning, I was pulled over doing 70 in a 55 mph zone by a 20-year old cop who was wearing sunglasses despite the fact that the sun was buried behind a wall of clouds. As luck would have it, we were late for a 9:30 a.m. memorial mass for Deanna's grandmother. That fact, my cute sleeping kids, and my stellar driving record persuaded him to let me off with a warning. Perhaps Deanna's grandmother was simply having a bit of fun with us, as we were, spookily, pulled over across from the entrance to the cemetery where she was buried.

Bears Playoff Hopes Live On, Family Time to Suffer Further: Half-way through the 4th quarter of the Bears game on Sunday, Rex Grossman fumbled for what seemed like the 8th time of the day. With the Bears down by 14, I turned off the TV in disgust, and loudly proclaimed to Deanna that the season was over, that I was done watching any further Bears games for the year, that the players should be shamed into giving back their undeserved salaries, and that Sunday afternoons were once again "Family-Time". I wasn't alone, and I am sure any alien listening devices aimed from outer space at the Chicago-metro area at about that time would have picked up the sound of thousands of TVs clicking off simultaneously. It was only by chance that twenty minutes later I went down to the basement where we had left a TV on and learned the Bears had closed to within a touchdown. They, of course, went on to win in overtime, thereby keeping hope alive and requiring at least one additional Sunday of me being tethered to a TV for further torture prior to the eventual and inevitable extinguishing of all hope. Until such time, Sunday afternoon Family Time is on hold. Daddy likes a quiet baby.

Back to School: As we walked Owen through the school parking lot yesterday morning, he yelled "Hey Gas-hogger!!" at the driver of a GMC Yukon. Strikes me that it might be time to dial-down the anti-large SUV ranting around the house.

Attack of the Giraffes

The twins turned 1 1/2 a couple of days back. They are slow to talk, especially compared to how verbal Owen was at this age, but I feel they are, at last, on the verge of a verbal-explosion.

While Hayden already sports a massive vocabulary consisting of "mama, dada, duck and boo (the latter having gotten quite a workout in the recent Halloween-season), both Hayden and Cooper currently communicate primarily through baby sign language and by grunting and pointing. The pointing by Hayden is often accompanied by quite a bit of animation and urgency, along with a series of plaintive little "ah, ah, ah" sounds. Sort of like Lassie, but instead of trying to alert us to trouble down at the old mill, it usually turns out to be something much more mundane - most commonly that Cooper has swiped something from him.

Cooper meanwhile, has, in recent weeks, taken a stab at making animal noises. Hopefully a precursor to actual words and a ritual I would guess has been enjoyed by toddlers for the last 6000 years or so. Apparently channeling those cave-dwelling ancestors, Cooper makes the same drawn out monotone grunt for every single animal. It actually sounds an awful lot like Phil Hartman doing Frankenstein on those old Saturday Night Live skits. Probably for that reason, I find it endlessly amusing to sit with him and go through a book featuring different animals. After I turn each page, he gazes at the new animal with a serious little face, points at it and goes "aaaaaaaagggg." So, although giraffes don't actually have voiceboxes (or so my smart wife claims - sounds like crazy-talk to me), I like to imagine a pack of them lumbering along stiff-legged, making their ominous Frankenstein-sounds as they bear down on an unsuspecting Village while Lassie attempts in vain to wake the local Sheriff.

You Can't Get Through!

A recent favorite game of me and the boys in the evening is "You Can't Get Through!" This essentially consists of me building a blockade of pillows and blankets in the upstairs hallway and the boys attempting to breach the wall while I try to support and maintain it from the other side (I would respectfully suggest that the offensive linemen of the Chicago Bears might want to try this game at home with their own kids, in order to get in some much needed additional practice). While attempting to prevent a breach, I will periodically yell "You Can't Get Through!" - thus the not-so-creative name of the game. They ultimately, of course, do get through, proving Dad wrong once again. I suppose that I could fancy up my motives and claim that through this simple exercise I am teaching them that no obstacle is insurmountable, no mountain too high, no river too wide. If I had daughters, I could even rename the game "Glass-Ceiling." But, in reality, it is just another excuse to wrestle around as I get them good and wound up just prior to bed, a dubious endeavor that has not escaped the eagle eye of my wife. I am also a sucker for anything that keeps them from spreading a million plastic or wooden pieces, figures, shapes, etc. around the house, so that the time we spend restoring the place following their Sherman-like march of destruction towards bed each night is marginally curtailed.

Post-Halloween Thoughts

Hey parents, were you as disappointed as I was in the lack of variety of candy being disbursed by your neighbors on Halloween this year?? While much has been made of the shrinking size of the candy portions being made for Halloween, I also feel like everyone is buying the same couple of variety bags of treats from the local mega-mart. Granted, the situation was not helped by the kids, who, when offered a choice at a trick-or-treat stop, would invariably grab the exact same things we were giving away at our house. Owen, bless his kind little heart, was doing this in part because he knows I love peanut butter cups, but without regard to the fact that we already had a zillion back at home. Anyway, whatever happened to Butterfingers? Not a one to be found (well, okay, there was one, which I promptly ate and probably what has inspired this mini-rant - perhaps I should just drag myself down to the store and pony up a dollar to by myself one instead of whining here). I would like to give kudos to John and Connie down the block for stepping out of the box AND supporting a local business by giving away Ferrara Pan products, including Red Hots and LemonHeads. Also, Hershey's "Take 5" bars (peanut butter, peanuts, pretzel, caramel, and milk chocolate!) are a winner and I predict a long and happy future for this bar. Although the Hershey's website claims Take 5 has was introduced almost three years ago, this is the first time I remember seeing them in such wide distribution.