Greetings from The Mitten!

Last updated on: February 26, 2015 at 10:57 pm by Jane the Actuary

Greetings from The Mitten! 2015-02-26T22:57:13-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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You know, as family visits go, this falls in the category of “OK.”

Our first stop in (metro) Detroit, prior to my parents’ house, was the previously-mentioned John King Books. Was it everything I remembered? Not really. Big, yes. Also fairly dusty and dingy and, in the end, I wasn’t able to browse in a particularly relaxed way because, since it was my idea to go there, I felt reponsible for making sure everyone else was finding something. The youngest was too young to really find anything, the middle child found a big book on the Roman Empire, the oldest found a math book he liked, and my husband found some old stock certificates. My middle son was disappointed that the children’s fiction was all old stuff, and wasn’t particularly impressed with it, even though I thought it was pretty cool that there were all sorts of WWI and WWII-era books for boys about young men joining the military and having other adventures, and tales of Pony Express riders, and Horatio Alger stories from the early 1900s, and he eventually settled on a 1940 novel about two new sailor recruits.

Afterwards we made our way to Mom and Dad’s house, where we spent a good portion of the afternoon talking to them and to my brother and sister-in-law, played a round of Yahtzee, went out to dinner, and then resumed talking. This morning we all slept in, had breakfast, then started in on preparing dinner, which we were actually reasonably successful in its timing — taking the turkey out of the roaster, the ham out of the oven, and getting the sides to the table, still warm, shortly after the 12:30 Lions/Bears football game was over. Then, clean-up, and later, a couple rounds of Uno.

Dad is, disappointingly, doing worse than when we were here a couple months ago — both physically (standing up out of his chair) and mentally (thinking through the process of a Yahtzee turn, and, during Uno, keeping track of when it was his turn and once playing a Wild card for no discernable reason, naming as his chosen color exactly the same color as it was before). No clear solutions here yet.

But with my boys being old enough to (mostly) entertain themselves, life is a lot easier than when I’d have to try to keep a baby happy while at the same time wanting to interact with adults.

Also — no big family arguments on hot-button issues. That’s just not what we do.

Up next: Christmas shopping, which gets increasingly difficult as the boys get older. The oldest really has no particular ideas of what he’d like (and is entirely indifferent to the clothes he wears, so that’s not an option), and the middle one now just wants gift cards so he can pick out his own things. Youngest still has a defined wish list: sketch pencils and all kinds of legos.

Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving!

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