Like Little Jack Horner,  I sat in the corner shed, but when I put in my thumb I pulled out a large, vicious looking bug attached to it.   That will teach me to rummage for wrapping paper without looking where my hands are going.  Although if the truth must be told, I’d rather have an aching, throbbing appendage for half a week than pretend yet again I’m being chased by bees…or be Elmo for hours upon hours. (perhaps a slight exaggeration).   Jamie’s therapist suggested we play one-on-one… on the floor… uninterrupted… for at least 30 min at a time… every day.    Sounds easy enough maybe, and yet to get it done, I have to set the timer.   It’s not that I don’t love playing with Jamie,  really I do, but our separate, first-born agendas run smack head on into each other.  He doesn’t want to make believe stuff I want to, and in this instance his card trumps mine.  Darn speech therapist.  So while I would prefer to scale imaginative mountains and dance wildly in far off kingdoms, Jamie thinks it’s a riot to rescue me from bees.   In the sentiments of Indiana Jones,  why’d it have to be bees?  They’re the only thing I’m truly terrified of in the spiders/snakes/sharks category.  Per Jamie’s request, I run around the house with a bucket on my head and yell “Bees! bees! somebody save me” and Jamie comes running to my rescue, at which point we both collapse onto the floor holding our sides with laughter.  But then we have to do it again, and again, and again, while Charlie just looks on benevolently.

Every year Jim sighs and wishes we could have a Charlie Brown christmas, and every year we deck our halls with homemade ornaments mixed with dollar store crap, and I congratulate him on the charlie browness of it all.  This year, we had an extra dose of Charles Schultz as we cut down a Christmas tree off our own property? (or my parents property, I’m not sure exactly where the line is).   It had a big gaping hole on one side, so I just rotated it around to the back, but then I noticed another gaping hole, so I rotated the tree again, to discover there was yet another garish blank spot in the front like an elementary kid’s missing front teeth and I realized it was a hopeless case that could only be remedied by lots of lights and ribbon.   We covered it lavishly in lights, twirled decadent ribbon around it and if it’s possible, the tree actually seemed worse.  It looked positively sheepish as if it were apologizing for it’s fine feathers that were doing nothing for it’s homely looks.   So I forgave it, and I love it anyway despite itself.   Jamie also loves it although he spent more time trying to decorate himself than the tree.

Tonight while we were doing dishes, Jamie kept sticking his head intentionally in Charlie’s face and then howling injuriously when Charlie inevitably would tug on his brother’s curls.  I tried to capture the thing on video, but of course they stopped doing it as soon as the camera came out.