Growing Versions

As the little children in my lives continue to grow, my humour has changed.  I started parenting full of jokes.  At first, it was self-deprecating zingers to cope with the overwhelming scope of my new job description.  As my children began to emerge and begin talking back, I tended to give into humour that was a little on the ridiculous side.  I would hear their lament, sometimes from their position sprawled on the floor of the grocery store and rally them with quips to get them up and out the door. Their ardent, earnest queries like, will you pick me up? were often met with jokey gambits like ...oh no sorry, I packed your sleeping bag so you can sleep here all night.  After a while, this approach ( as hilarious as it was to me) came to irritate my kids and they would vehemently command me not to joke.  As time slipped by, first my daughter, then my son started to become sarcastic and quick witted and my wit began to dim. As their humour turned more ca...

The advice was a little late for me, I didn't hear it until after my kids graduated out of infanthood, but it is such good advice that I apply it to my life now even without babies keeping me up all hours. The advice is this: when you have an infant keeping you up throughout the night, keep going back to bed until you accumulate enough hours of sleep that you are used to.  This is not easy if you are at home alone with kids, but it's good advice in principle. This advice applies to anyone.  Ignore it at your peril. I did, but now I am taking it all the way to new level of enough.

This summer my kids grew a little more before my eyes. They tried out new roles and looks out of the range of the scorching eyes of classmates that have known them since preschoolhood. Video games and ocean currents re-wired their circuits. Most nights, my kids went to bed long after me.  I woke up to inventions carved out of syrofoam and pop cans and the leftovers of a Barbie rave. These campfire sparks. These flares.  These tiny red hot embers. These night lights.

It is the tail end of birthday season 2017.  Just one more to go. This was the first year ever that I didn't lose sleep over kid birthday parties. The older kid had two very grown up outings with friends. The younger invited everyone he could think of to the splash pad. We had a lot of fun planning it together because we got to plan the fun stuff: the type of pinata, what to put in the pinata, the best type of water gun, only fun decisions. We got to the park a few minutes before his friends and picked a random tree to attach this pinata to. After the kids arrived, they quickly discovered that it had been attached to a rather special tree. It had been planted to honour the life of "The Candy Lady", Lizzy Hutchinson.  I have a feeling she would have approved.