All the Old/Young Dudes

I love my family.

I love us best when we are all together in a big family clump, all ten or so of us, shouting over each other until Dad or Paul gets a headache.

It's changed since I was young. Now instead of the party starting when Gran took out her hearing aid because she didn't need it anymore (all of us shouting, remember) and we all sat down around the dining room table wherever we were to play board games like Pit, Balderdash, or Trivial Pursuit, and if we chose the latter we all argued to get Dougie on our team because he was the only one who knew how many innings there were in a baseball(?) game or even what an inning was.

Is?

Now the party starts when we mistakingly get too loud for Katie, and she wakes up from her nap. Dylan is still too little for loudness to really matter.

Then, it becomes an Entertaining Katie party, the kind at which I excel, because I am really just a big kid after all, and I can color with the best of them. Have you seen those Color Wonder markers? They are magical.


I spent the weekend teaching that girl how to break her crayons for fun, and that tearing off the paper is an olympic sport in which speed is not so much a factor as is how intact the paper is at the end.


And all of us were poised to leap out of the way as either Grandpa or Katie had potty time.

Because there is a certain urgency at either age.

And Dylan...

Meet Dylan:


Dylan, who is too little to give the vaguest attention to his surroundings, was passed about for the first hour or so, then deposited in some rocking cradle contraption where he slept for hours afterward, until it was time for food.


Meanwhile, Grandpa watched the end of a baseball game, ate something, and went to sleep for hours afterward.


And I listened while Katie told me all about her new swing-set, an early birthday present, and asked me if I could do an abundance of things, like touch my toes, or roll over on the carpet.

We live so far apart, but she still asked if Paul was coming, Tall Paul, she called him.

And she remembered meeting Darcy, pointing out a sheepdog in one of her books and telling me it was "my doggie."

Genius. Pure genius.