The Napping House

Bubble time

An evening out might be good for the soul, but it did nothing for my fatigue.  (As I type this, I can hear my mother rattling a bottle of vitamins at me. You're right, mom, and I took one this morning.) The abrupt change to cold and rainy weather didn't help.  I hated to get out of bed this morning, and probably wouldn't have if if Joey hadn't crawled in beside me, pretending to sleep, whispering "Honk shoo, honk shoo," in my ear.

And having Dennis there, handing me a full French of coffee as I stumbled out of the room, helped too.  But I only had time for one mug: instead of curling up with a whole pot and a book, I was good and virtuous mommy and yawned my way through Joey's play group.

Playing with the giant ball ramp outside of play group:
it's excellent for cars, too.

Pretty neat, huh?  There's a crank to ratchet
the balls to the top.

But I was ready to crawl right back into bed when, during a quick stop at the grocery store on the way home, a man hollered at me for holding up the line when the credit card reader wasn't working.  I reallywish I had the language skills to tell him to use his nice words and his inside voice.  Instead, all I could summon was my most heavily-used German phrase, "Tut mir leid" ("I'm sorry").  But my humility inspired his wife to whack him with her purse so that I didn't have to.

But, good news! Our morning at play group tired Joey out as much as it did me, and he curled up for a nap right after lunch.  With Ella at school, that left me with just Alex, who looked outside, wrinkled his nose at the the rain, and asked if we could snuggle under a blanket and read a book. And then he brought me a photo album to look through.

Both Ella and Alex have this persistent worry that their memories of Kirkland are slipping away from them.  Ella, when she's in a blue mood, will tell me that she scarcely knows what our living room looks like, or that she can't remember our backyard very well.  Alex tends to make these observations more matter-of-factly: he's not all together sure he can remember what his room looks like, he'll tell me, or; looking at pictures of Christmas time, he'll say things like "Do we have a fireplace? I forgot."

Dreaming of the West Beach Resort: this was
taken during our trip there last Memorial Day
weekend, when we visited with my sister and
my sweet niece.

Which, of course, makes me wonder how long memories of Zürich will stay in their minds, and what, in particular, they'll remember.  Dennis and I do our best to reinforce memories, showing them videos of our day trips or talking about things we've done in the last months, but we're doing so much, and seeing so many different things, that I wonder if any of it at all will stick.  Are we overloading them?

Judging by there very spotty memories of vacations we've taken in the past years, I don't have much hope for their retention.  We've taken them to Texas a half-dozen times, and their recollection of those visits is spotty at best; our drive through California is a blur.  The exceptions are those few places where we slowed down and stayed a while: our wonderful trips home to Cleveland to visit my family, and the long weekends we've spent at Orcas Island, WA, which, I think, is my kids' favorite place in the world. When Alex came to the pictures of Orcas in our album, he started kissing the page. This evening, when I mentioned to Dennis how much Alex loves it there, he said, Ella was talking about it too, just yesterday telling him earnestly, "everything is just perfect there."

Dennis can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the cabins that we usually stay in are a little too rustic for his tastes.  When I mentioned booking something for next spring, he asked if maybe, just maybe, we could stay somewhere else next time. But I think, after a year of new experience after new experience, the kids are starting to crave something ultra-familiar.  I think, after this long year, they might deserve a quiet weekend in our usual cabin.

Snuggling under a blanket, dreaming of campfires, proved too peaceful to resist: I asked Alex if I could just close my eyes for a moment, and he didn't mind.  I drifted off to him playing under the blankets next to me, whispering to his stuffed kitty: "Okay, kitty! We're going to go on a great adventure while mommy sleeps. Okay. We're going to go to this part of the bed."

I don't know how long I slept. It was probably only a few minutes. But, in that time, it appeared, from Alex's hushed whisperings, that he and kitty had found a race car under the sheets somewhere in the proximity of my feet, and, with their new wheels, were off to fight a giant robot. Man, I love that kid.

Ella came home soon after I woke up, and she settled in on her homework.  Dennis, also feeling wiped out, came home from work early as well and went to take his own turn at napping.  And Joey snoozed until I woke him up at 4:00. It was an excellent way to spend a rainy, cold Friday.

Susannah, Caroline, and baby Christopher came over for dinner and breathed a little life into our house.  Friday is pizza night for both our families, so they joined us for some oven-baked semi-goodness.  Every Friday, I get the e-mail blast from Garlic Jim's, offering me three pizzas for $15, or some other screaming deal, and every Friday I sigh, turn on the oven, and open up a cardboard box frozen pizza.  Oh well.

But, when coupled with The Land Before Time (Rawr!), it still makes for a fun evening. And Ella is deep into a new fantasy/science fiction series.  Every night this week at bedtime she would tell me that her heart's greatest desire was to read as long as she wanted at bedtime.  I tried to give her that tonight: we sent her to bed at 7:00 with her book...but, when she was still reading at 10:00, I had to turn off the light.  But still it was a nice way to ease into the weekend: a quiet night for Dennis and me, and a book and a half devoured for little Ella.