Christmas catalogs have such lovely Christmasy colors and chocolate and cookies even twisted and inverted into confusing configurations is always a welcome sight. Especially for those of us cutting down on our sugar intake...
I wanted to leave this one up to Jon, but wasn't sure he'd do it. I don't usually do bedtime, as I loathe it. We don't enforce bedtimes, but do have a bit of a routine. At some point we usually just announce that it's time, especially if one or more of the boys is getting grumpy. They're very willing to go usually, so there's no coersion. Sometimes there's a bit of convincing, as it were, but they very much enjoy being read to at night. Often, they're the initiators of storytime. Bastian is particularly gung-ho about stories and will stack piles and piles of books on the bed, wanting to read all of them. They fight over who gets to lay where and anymore whichever parent is reading must lay in the middle of the bed so everyone gets a mama or papa snuggle and a good view for seeing the pictures.
But bedtime plans went awry anyway. Papa went out to spend time grading papers in the evening and I was busy trying to get all the things I'm always trying to get done, done. Including ordering calendars for holiday gifts for the Grandpas to insure that they were made and shipped in time. This was especially time consuming this year as Jon removed all the digital pictures from the desktop and put them on the external hard drive. Which is a good idea, in theory, but which slows me down just enough to complicate getting my lists checked off.Additionally, I have come to realize how much I wish I had a digital SLR camera. I have a nice little point and shoot digital that seems to work quite nicely - as long as there is light. And here is my problem. All the photos from December are dark and yellow-y and don't necessarily have my children in them - thus were not good candidates for the calendar. I'm a hobby photographer, in a way. I have film cameras that are nice - several in fact - but lack the funds to get a Nikon D60 or some such thing with a detachable flash I can bounce off the ceiling to give the impression of daylight in my dim kitchen with its west-facing windows that open onto gray Ohio skies, darkened too much already by three in the afternoon.
In the end, I had to take all the shades off the lamps to hold an endlessly frustrating photo session with the boys that ended in tears for all of us (why do I do this?!?!) and resulted in this being the only decent photograph. And Aleks' face is still blurry. It'll do.
The exhaustion of this endeavor and the intense irritation we all suffered due to it, meant that without Jon at home, I lacked the energy or the motivation to do anything more than put a movie on for the boys and veg out. Bastian ultimately passed out, practically where he was standing:
So I thought it was a failure. Jon got home and read Aleks to sleep, but since Bastian was already out and I was in no mood for anything, I didn't push the puppet idea. The next day I mentioned needing to do the puppet story to Jon and come to find out that Aleks enforced the idea! They did it after all though no one thought to mention it to me. I asked what the story was about, but Jon claimed to not remember anything more than they had a conversation with puppets and suggested I ask Aleks what the story was about. All I got out of him though was the following: "Papa nearly gave me a heart attack! He nearly gave me an infection!" When pressed further, he said that Papa made the T-Rex bite him and this was why he nearly had a heart attack and an infection. And that was all. That's the whole story.
No comments:
Post a Comment