None But Eagles

Could Look Him In The Face

  • 27th
  • December
  • 2011

Christmas was different this year. For one thing, we celebrated it in two family occasions where we usually had one. The first was on Friday, a sit-down turkey dinner at my parents’ house with my immediate family and maternal grandparents, which amounted to twenty-one people, six of whom were children. The second was a soup-and-buns buffet-style lunch with the extended family, also at my parents’ house. The other big difference is that family gatherings are very much kid-centred now. Not that this is a new thing — my sister and my cousin had five kids between them last year (two of them infants) — but now my other two sisters also have kids of their own (one set of infant twins and one pair of step-kids-to-be), so the proportion of kids versus adults has greatly increased. For the last ten years or so, we’ve done Secret Santas or gift exchange games because almost everyone was old enough to buy gifts for each other, but this year, everyone brought gifts for the kids. The pendulum has swung back into the madness my siblings and cousins and I made when we were kids ourselves.

As a devoted aunt, I took it upon myself to serve as child-wrangler. Of course I was only one in an army of child-wranglers, and I was only willing to wrangle a subset of all possible children, but playing with the kids is one of the best parts of family gatherings, so I took full advantage of this duty while everyone else prepared food or washed dishes or had grown-up conversations.

I followed one-year-old Isabel around to make sure she didn’t climb up the stairs by herself or open a bottle of ginger ale or drink someone’s wine or eat any wrapping paper. I carried her around and hummed a song and rubbed her back when she showed signs of being sleepy, although this only ever led to a thirty-second power nap after which she gabbled at me, clearly thanking me for the rest but asking if she could please get down now so she can try the stairs again?

My greatest accomplishment this Christmas (other than the raw-egg-white-less eggnog!) was getting three-year-old Alexander to say a whole sentence. He knows a lot of words and will repeat what you say (when I say, “Hey, buddy!” to him, he says it right back to me. We’re good pals), but he doesn’t do sentences yet. So we were upstairs by ourselves in the spare room, where it was much quieter and cooler, playing a game that involved me dragging him across the bed by his legs and tickling him until he crawled away (a variation on an earlier game that involved me dragging him out from under a piece of furniture and throwing him onto the sofa, over and over again. My knees are still bruised from that). Every time he wanted me to do it again, I asked him to say, “Grab my legs.” (Completely by accident, it’s also a quote from Castle, although the associations might not be terribly appropriate.) At first he would only say any two of the three words, but finally he started saying the whole thing, following it each time with an enormous grin because he knew very well he was being cute.

The three-month-old twins are not yet of wrangling age (they’re getting close though; they’re not even scary to hold anymore), but I fed, burped, and put to sleep little Moriah. I was cool with not doing the same for Ethan because the last time I held him he threw up on me a lot. They look nothing like twins and less like aliens every time I see them. Ethan has gigantic eyes and makes the best crazy baby faces ever. Moriah is a little more chillax and has grown some impressively chubby cheeks. It’s hard to find something to say about these two because they are still at the eat/burp/sleep/diaper-change time of life, but I’m really looking forward to hearing what they think about the book of nursery rhyme comics I gave them for Christmas.

  1. erasingist said: My prediction: They’ll think it tastes yummy.
  2. popscratch posted this