Sundays with Stretchy Pants

I missed you the most, Google Reader.

I don’t like my inbox to be full and I don’t like my Google Reader to tell me I have more than, like, five new blog posts to read so when I opened up the reader this morning and it told me there were 347 new items to read, I had a mild panic attack and then I hit “mark all as read” with enough force to shatter my mouse. So if somebody blogged about something super important, let me know because I so hate to be out of the loop. What if Dawn fell in a well or something? It would suck if I called over there and was all, “Hey, Brett, Lemme talk to Dawn; I missed that bitch!” and Brett burst into tears. Awkward.

We got back home last night and I’ve been grocery shopping, laundering, yoga-ing and just generally freshening since then. I suppose I eventually have to pick the hamster up from Kristen’s house. Maybe. We’ll see.

Chesaning was lovely. I make fun of it a lot, but there’s really nothing like feeling like you have two homes. My nephew’s party was tons of fun and look at these awesome centerpieces:

And look what my nephew made:

Yeah, he made that. Cool.

My sister’s youngest daughter is staying with us for a little bit so I have to go pretend like it’s fun around here so she doesn’t get homesick. More catching up later.

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And we’re going to Chesaning this weekend to celebrate him and his high school graduation. He was born a day before my 15th birthday and he was every bit the adorable pudgy little doll baby. I loved driving him around in my sweet muffler-less Chevette and feeding him Happy Meals while he yelled out, “Putt-putt!” every time he saw a tractor in a field or “Who dat?” every time I waved at a passing car. He called me Aunt Babby and liked to play with my big, permed hair. And I don’t mean he liked to twirl a piece around his fingers while drifting off to sleep. He would say, “Can I hode your hair Aunt Babby?” and I would sit on the floor while he stood behind me and played with my hair. With his face. And his drool. He was endearingly odd in that way, but I let him do it because he was my sweet little first-born nephew.  He also used to use his eight thousand toy tractors (which he still has) to make elaborate farms and if you happened to need to walk through his play space, he would screech, “DON’T STEP ON MY FIEEEELD!” Very serious business, carpet farming. Sometimes we would have to pole vault over his precious farmland in order to get through to the bathroom.

And now he’s all grown up and only calls me Babby if he’s trying to get me to do something for him, which works every time. He doesn’t drool in my hair anymore while piling it on top of his face. And maybe he doesn’t play with his toy tractors anymore (that’s a big maybe), but that would only be because he gets to drive the real ones with real crops, which is no different than playing. But he’s still my nephew and I still adore him and I’m so looking forward to seeing who he becomes in this next phase of life. And I reserve the right to make him call me Aunt Babby for the rest of my life.

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Happy Easter.

I have many friends. Rum is not one of them.

My mom is here for one more night, but my brother and sister-in-law and their 3 boys left earlier today after a couple of nights of proving that none of us are mature enough to be entrusted with housepets, let alone children. Bryan and I have so much fun with these people and we just lose our heads with the loveliness of it all and we can’t be trusted to just play cards and sip some wine like regular grown-ups. Here is a good rule to live by: When the wine is gone, you’ve had enough. Don’t go get your mom’s rum and decide that you think you can drink like a real drinker. You can’t. It will end badly. Sure, there will be lots of fun before it all goes badly (and during the part where it is going badly for you, your houseguests and husband might act like it’s the best part of the night. For they will still be laughing. And taking pictures of you going badly.)

Before it all started to go badly, though, I’m pretty sure that the 4 of us solved most, if not all, of the world’s problems. Pretty sure. We were so frickin’ smart last night! You don’t even know.
And the daylight hours were precious. The 6 kids (7 if you count my mom, which I do) played together well. We ate good food. We talked good talks. We drank good drinks. And as a bonus, we remembered to put the Easter baskets out. It was a happy Easter

To prepare for next year, I’m going Catholic and I’m giving up rum for Lent. I’m also going to start working on my dodge ball dodging because whenever my brother gets a ball in his hands, he insists on acting like he’s 13 and I’m 7 again. Yes, I took a soccer ball to the back of the head while we were at the park and then I had to listen to Mike cackle maniacally. Just a warning, old man, laughing that hard at your age is unattractive and unhealthy, so stop it.

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