The Monday Morning Epistle

We woke up Sunday morning to what I would consider a ‘perfect’ snowstorm: heavy snowfall from before dawn until mid-morning, followed by a bright sunny afternoon. This kept the snow around long enough to make everything postcard-pretty but still left time for the roads to clear by the time Alex had to drive to work that evening. It also was sufficient snow to amuse Monkey-Boy on the walk to and from church, which was conducted at a snail's pace punctuated by tiny snowballs and spontaneous flurries of hand-tossed snow. Garion was disappointed that he couldn't play in the fast-running streams of muddy water in the gutter, but was somewhat mollified by being allowed to throw snowballs at fences. As soon as we (finally) got home, it was my turn to play in the snow, i.e., shovel the driveway; I briefly considered a pilot flight for our monster snow-blower, but discarded the idea because it seemed such overkill for the meager inch or so of melting snow.

When Santa Claus acquired two Transformer toys, he debated at great length with Mrs. Claus over which child should receive which toy. Naturally, a few days after Christmas, Garion fired the opening salvo in the ‘great Transformer debate’ when he asked if he could trade his Bumble-Bee robot for Alex's Megatron robot. The parental ruling was that a trade was acceptable as long as both parties agreed, and it's fun to watch Alex lovingly extort promises of everything in the world from his little brother. Inevitably, Garion wants to ‘trade back’ within a few hours, whereupon negotiations start afresh and Garion ends up owing Alex another car, or another million dollars, or whatever other ridiculously-plausible fee Alex can think up. Either way, Garion is very careful to keep track of which robot belongs to him (and which one does not) and is much better at returning borrowed items than his older brother.

Today is ‘back to school’ for the Gruesome Twosome, and while Alex looked forward to rejoining his social peer group, Jacob clearly mourned the lost opportunity to sleep until noon. Grumpy has definitely inherited Mary's night owl gene, and is happiest in ‘late to bed / late to rise’ mode. We typically spend the last few days of every school vacation goading Jacob into bed before midnight, then coaxing him out of bed around eight o'clock the next morning. In contrast, Alex and Garion both take after me, and are face-down in their soup by 9 pm, but voluntarily up and about by 6 am every morning, which Mary seems to find perpetually repulsive.

KidBit: From the Jacob/English Dictionary: “We need to get one of those bounce table things for our backyard.” (trampoline)

PotW: The Gleeful Threeful pose with their cousins Taylor & Katie immediately after Taylor's graduation. Nobody gets extra points for figuring out which of our sons decided to be deliberately non-cooperative all afternoon…

Until next week…Tschüß!

,,,^..^,,,

2008.01.21-21:35