The Countdown

This Saturday Steve and Joy will take my children with them to the beach for an entire week. This will be the first time we've been away from Kate and Sarah for this long. I know a lot of parents for whom this sort of thing is old hat and they unanimously assure me that this is a blessed event about which I should be fully giddy. While I am looking forward to the time alone with my husband (who's that guy in my house? He's kinda cute...), I will miss my girls an awful lot. So I've been vacillating between making ambitious plans and feeling wistful.

Meanwhile, Kate and Sarah are beside themselves with excitement and are counting the hours until they launch. We will probably begin setting things aside to pack this evening. Sarah is very concerned that I will miss her far too much, and end up crying all week. Yesterday she explained to me that she will leave Piggy, with whom she sleeps every night, here with me, so that I can sleep with her and if I begin to miss Sarah too much, I can just kiss Piggy.

Monday evening, as we sat with Steve and Joy and the girls at the dinner table, toasting the birth of our nation, Kate demanded the floor. "Quiet please! Quiet please!" she said, holding her hands up in the air to silence our prattle. "I have something to say." We'd just taught the girls the Interrupting Cow knock knock joke, so it took poor Kate a few attempts to speak without us mooing at her. "First, I apologize for interrupting your conversation. I just wanted to say that I am very excited about next week and, I wanted to say, Aunt Jo Jo and Uncle Steve, thank you for inviting me to go to the beach with you." That's right. That's my kid right there. Never mind that she'd been in time-out just an hour earlier for disobeying me, now she was a super star. Between leaving me Piggy and being gracious (un-coached), those girls are just trying to make me not want them to go. They're tricky that way.