I’m busy and maybe I’m still in mourning. I don’t know. I paint stuff and take the kids to the pool and think about Michael Jackson and Walter Cronkite and run and play variations of hide-and-seek, but blogging hasn’t been on my to-do list.

We’re heading to Michigan today (not Cluck & Tweet’s Michigan, but still). My sister and I will beat my my nephew’s girlfriend and my niece in tennis on Saturday morning and then we’ll spend the rest of the day gloating about that while the kids swim in the pond and play with their cousin Riley. Sunday, there will be an Aldrich family reunion, and then a childless trip home as the kids are staying a few days in order to camp with my inlaws. What will we do with no children? Paint, of course. I’m going to paint 14 hours a day for 3 days. I hope I finish the whole house. After  my 14 hours of painting, Bryan and I will eat at restaurants and maybe go to Zoombezi Bay one night. Who knows? We’re crazy kids, we could do anything! ANYTHING! As long as the painting gets done, I mean. The painting must get done. I will miss the children because they rock, but they’ll be in good hands and they’ll still rock when they get back. And the walls will be painted. Yay!

Oh, and new toilet! Monday! Plumber!

As usual, don’t break in while we’re gone and make sure you cry because you miss us. If you could videotape yourself crying and post it on Youtube, that would be a bonus. I’ll give you bonus points. (You didn’t know I’ve been giving you all points all this time? I won’t take away any points for that).

Back to life in Columbus. Bryan and I think it’s unfair that we had to wake up to an alarm clock today and eat fibrous cereals instead of sleeping in until 9:00 and waking up to doughnuts. So many doughnuts! Do you know the thing about doughnuts? If they’re there, we’ll eat them. They taste good with coffee. And they taste good with ham.

I’ve written about my love of ring-shaped pastry before, but I’ve never actually succumbed to the seduction of Buckeye Donuts’ evil delivery system. In Chesaning, though, there are doughnuts to be had without even ordering them because my inlaws are extremely generous people and if they see you eat one doughnut, they will lovingly provide piles of them for you on a daily basis. And they won’t believe you when you say, “No, really, you don’t have to buy any more doughnuts.” Come to think of it, maybe they just couldn’t understand what we were saying with our mouth full of doughnuts. It’s hard to talk that way. Seriously, though, my body doesn’t know what to do with granola anymore. Here’s a hint, body: digest the shit out of it. Literally. Please.

We don’t have a lot of family traditions that have been lovingly passed down from generation to generation. I used to think it was just because my parents were kind of lazy and drunk a lot, but now I know the truth. Because I’m kind of lazy and drunk from time to time, too, but we still have some first-generation traditions.

My mom used to make cinnamon rolls once every few years on Christmas morning. I don’t really remember it too often from my childhood, but that could be because I wasn’t really into them back then. In the past few years she has told me that she made them every year, so what do I know? I know she used frozen bread dough and joked about how her insane mom used to make them from scratch. Adding to the “joke,” she’d say, “Of course, then she’d end up pulling our hair and calling us all sluts,” and she’d laugh. Hahahaha. “So, see? It’s better to use frozen dough.” So funny.

I like to bake, but I don’t do the cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning. And it’s because I don’t want to pass down my grandmother’s tradition. Because she’s mean. And I don’t want her little mean pieces being passed on through her stupid, yummy cinnamon rolls. This is the first time I’ve really understood that her meanness is the reason I don’t pass it on. I know this because the one and only passed-down tradition I loved to cling to was my dad’s family tradition of Christmas Eve hot cocoa in a Santa mug. It’s a tradition from my long-dead Grandma Lena. I’ve written about her before. She’s the one that died when my dad was 14. I never knew her, but there she sits on her pedestal.

We did not practice Grandma Lena’s tradition when we were growing up. My dad had his original Santa mug from when he was a little boy and it was always used as decoration during Christmas; never for function. It wasn’t until, I don’t know, between 8 and 10 years ago, that all of his grandkids started receiving Santa mugs in order to carry out the Christmas Eve cocoa tradition. I, as the one who always craved this kind of tradition, jumped all over it enthusiastically every single Christmas. This year? I’m dreading it. I don’t want to pass it on. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to keep the Santa mugs sacred until the big day. I don’t want Christmas to come. I couldn’t figure out why there was this niggling dread in the back of my mind, but now I realize it’s because my dad is, this year and not for the first time, a big schmuck.

After my parents divorced when I was 12, I worked hard to get to a good relationship place with him and his second wife, whom my kids refer to as “Grandma.” Really hard. It took all the way until I was about 24 or 25, but it was good. It was good until last year when he left his second wife and her kids and grandkids for another woman. He sacrificed us, his first family, for this second family and then he left them. And I don’t like that. And I’m having trouble with him. And so I’m having trouble with his traditions. And now I know that this is what kills family traditions. Family connections are broken, so what’s the point of traditions? If that connection is gone and you don’t want it back, then you don’t need the traditions. It feels false to carry it on with my kids with the usual, cheery, “This is how Grandpa used to spend his Christmas Eve with his little brother and your Great-Grandma Lena,” because who cares? Who really cares? I don’t care.

*sigh*

But I will do it again this year. I will. Probably. Because it really has become our own tradition and, I think, being aware of the reason I don’t want to do it helps a little. It’s our tradition. Yes, my dad’s bits and pieces are all over it. And part of me believes that his bits and pieces should be shunned forever. But I don’t want to pass on our truest and most-followed family tradition: detachment. I don’t. I’ll make the stupid, yummy cinnamon rolls too. And I’ll tell the kids that their Great-Grandma Devereaux (the one that they’ve seen only a handful of times and, no, she’s not dead yet) used to make them, and their Grandma Marilyn used to make them and we’ll talk about traditions and sadness and detachment and connection and disconnection and how sometimes it’s too late, but how we can do better. It’ll be more fun than it sounds.

It will be just like when we make my mother-in-law’s peanut butter balls and we talk about how Nana gave us the recipe and she’s been making them for a looong time. And how we talk about Grandma Hattie’s cut-out cookie recipe (even though she was just my babysitter and not a real relative at all, but more real than most.) And how we talk about most of the ornaments on our tree. They all came from somewhere else. My parents made some of them together when they made folk art in the ’80s. The rest have been gifts from my mom, my inlaws, my dad and my ex-stepmom. There is connection all over this disjointed family, in spite of ourselves. And it’s ok to pass it on.

Last weekend, we were sitting down to dinner and I mentioned to the rest of the table that, according to my brother-in-law’s nephew, some people think LSD helps increase brain function and maybe in the future they’ll be treating people like Grandma with low doses of LSD. As soon as I said that, Grandma perked up and started to laugh. I said, “Would you like that, Grandma?” and she said, “Yeah, oh yeah!” and then I said, “Grandma, did you used to take LSD?” and she said, “A lot, a lot, a lot, a lot!” and laughed and laughed. I believe that just the very mention of LSD caused her to have a moment of lucidity. And if I had any money at all, I would throw it at LSD research. In the name of science. And in the name of funny videos of the test subjects tripping.

Grandma always used to tell us that she danced on tables while people threw pennies at her when she was a young girl. Now I wonder if that was just a trip that she took.

We’re in Chesaning right now, so I haven’t had time to really think about a post or anything, but every once in a while my brain goes, “How in the hell do we trample a Wal-Mart worker on Black Friday?”

I’ll admit my bias here: I worked retail for 5 years and, since then, I’ve never set foot in a store on the day after Thanksgiving. To me, there’s no sale worth that hell. I feel so strongly about this that I really believe that if it came down to Black Friday sales being the only way Christmas could happen in the Aldrich house, then Christmas would have to wait. I don’t like it. I don’t like that they advertise a super-huge deal on something fancy and then only stock 4 of them. That makes people want to kill each other, so maybe we shouldn’t do that. I don’t know.

Anyway, my brother-in-law’s dad died the day before Thanksgiving so we’re up here for his funeral today. And the snow is all piled up. Incidentally, piled-up snow is another thing I don’t like. Feeling curmudgeonly today, apparently.

Something I do like: Going to Dave’s Bar with my sister and brother-in-law and reminiscing about his dad. My brother-in-law is the youngest in his family, so he’s definitely more like an older brother to a couple of his of-age nephews who were at the bar, too. It was lovely to hear these men speak with such affection and, at times, derision (in a good way) about the family patriarch. Rolly will be missed, but he has most definitely left an enduring legacy of humor and sweetness that can be seen in all of his grandkids. Especially my sister’s kids. I’m super biased like that. I wish they were old enough to hang out at the bar with us. I told my sister they could because I used to when I was little and nothing’s wrong with me, but for some reason, she laughed at that. It wasn’t really a laugh, it was more of a “HA!” I don’t get it.

Bryan’s dad turned 59 on Monday and Bryan and I talked all night about how that’s almost 60 and we remember when our parenst were 33 and 34 and weren’t they old? Yeah, but we’re not old, right? Nah! And our kids will be doing this when they’re in their 30s and they’ll talk about us like we’re about to die and that’s not cool! Those kids are mean! Let’s wake them up and beat them, thus proving our youthfulness. They’ll remember that, I bet!

My parents will be 60 in January and April. They’ve never seemed old before, but 60? It seems kind of old. Not because they’re old, but because I’m too young to have parents in their 60s. It’s about me! My parents were 26 when I was born, which is pretty young, so if they’re old, I’m old. It’s only logical.

Speaking of my parents, do you know that I still know the phone numbers to all of the bars in Chesaning, even the ones that are closed now (I’m looking at you Rathskellar and Farmers Inn) and the golf course? And of course Dave’s Bar, which has outlasted them all. I do. Because I used to call them a lot when I was a little girl. (No, not to order stuff, but if you know me in real life, I can see how you would think that). I’m not judging, but I can’t imagine a scenario in which my kids regularly had to call me or my husband at the bar. My parent shame would be unbearable and my wife rage would be, well, extremely unpleasant. Like the kind of unpleasant where you say, “Wow, this gunshot wound is extremely unpleasant.” But I guess if our kids had to call us at the bar, they would just call our cell phones and it wouldn’t suddenly hit them in adulthood that they know all of the phone numbers to the bars where they grew up. I guess that means we should go to the bar more often. Then we can forget about all of this oldness nonsense. Problem solved.

Adding to the oldness problem is a little theory that Bryan and I have. We believe that if you had kids before you turned 30, then you have to add the age of your oldest child to your actual calendar age and that gives you your true, social age. So we’re not 33 and 34. We’re 42 and 43, socially. It’s true. When we hang out with real 33 and 34 year olds, we have no idea what we’re doing. None. They talk differently. They drink differently. They care about different things. If they have children at all, they probably only have one so they’re still operating under the illusion that their child is interesting to other people. And it’s awkward when we laugh at them when they tell us their 18 month old is gifted. Because we think they’re joking, but they’re not. And then they think we’re mean, which we are, but that isn’t the point. The point is, we’re way older than everybody our age. And we’re all going to die. And now I have to take pictures again.

OMG, how did you guess that I’m going to Michigan? You’re so smart.

All the girls are going camping with my inlaws this weekend. They’ll be about two hours away from Chesaning for two nights and then I’ll join them for one night, unless it’s absolutely necessary that I join them sooner. I don’t think Maya has spent more than one night away from me at a time, but I’m not really worried about her. She digs my inlaws (and my inlaws’ food) and I know that if she’s having issues, they’ll call me. We used to camp with them for a weekend every summer when we lived in Michigan, but this will be the first time it’s happened since we moved to Columbus. Excitement abounds. I told my inlaws to just tell me when they want them, and I’d be sure to drive them up there. They requested this weekend, which turns out to be very convenient for me because my cousin is getting married Saturday. Wasn’t it lovely of her to plan her wedding around when we would be up in Michigan anyway? She’s always been sweet like that. I think I’ll put another $3-5 in her gift card just to show my appreciation.

So I’ll be packing today. I did my laundry and grocery shopping and baking yesterday. Baking? Yes, baking. My father-in-law needs to be compensated with chocolate chip cookies. He’s diabetic, so maybe I shouldn’t bake for him, but when I don’t bake for him, he whines about it. On the other hand, when I do bake for him, he tells me he’s diabetic and he shouldn’t be eating stuff like that. At least, I think that’s what he’s saying. It’s hard to understand him when he’s cramming cookies into his mouth.

Anyway, I’m going away again. I’ll miss you. I’ll be back Tuesday. And I’ll miss you.