Season's Beatings

“Do we have any white eggs? Not the brown. And do we have any coloring to color the eggs?”

“You mean Easter egg dye?”

“Yeah.”

It was Tess. She was twisting her mouth and clasping her hands together, like, being December and all, she knew it was a long shot, but she was really, really hoping I had some stashed away somewhere. 

Which, actually, I may have. Leftovers from last spring or something.

But no, Tess, we’re not dyeing Easter eggs. 

I can barely wrap my head around the fact that there are only five days until Christmas and all four kids will be home for all of them.

And because the “high” temps are in the single digits all week, I can’t send them out in the neighborhood. Suddenly the statements “go ride your bike to Ben’s house” or “go jump on the trampoline” have become child abuse.

I’d normally plan some outings or go run errands myself, but it’s too cold. I’m not leaving the house either. And quite frankly, we’ve done all those things. We saw Santa, we did our Christmas shopping, we hit up the Union Station Christmas display. Lou and I do Wonderscope and Science City all the freaking time. We did gingerbread houses, we baked, we’ve watched just about all the Christmas movies—even the ones that strongly allude to “no Santa”—and sipped hot chocolate. 

I shot all my “killing time” wads too early. 

In reality, I have a few more outings we could take, but again, it’s freezing outside. Though, at the moment, Sam’s in only his underwear and Lou’s totally pantless. 

So now we’ll just sit and wait.

For Christmas. 

Tess goes through her countdown every night at bedtime. 

“And when I wake up, there will be four days. Then three. Then two. Then it’ll be Christmas Eve!”

She’s at the ripest age for Christmas and Santa and all that. 

Nate has a few basketball practices sprinkled throughout the week. Just enough to keep him occupied, so he doesn’t start bullying The Others. Nate requires competition and physical activity to thrive. Which is why we keep signing him up for tournaments, tryouts, leagues, teams, and celebrity death matches. 

Which is why he walks around the house dribbling a basketball. And rollerblading in circles with Sam. 

And he balances his jock side with his nerd side with books. This week, he’s totally consumed with The Hunger Games series. He’s about to finish the third book, which is great because we can finally watch the last two movies with the kids. And that’ll kill a few more hours.

Though I think the last one may have contributed to Lou’s night terrors. Oh, well. We can sleep in all week. ALL WEEK.

The kids have arranged and rearranged all the presents under the tree about 17 thousand times. Without peeking. Which is impressive. They’re mostly gifts from Tighe’s parents and siblings, so each kid has a few wrapped packages down there. 

One of the packages, addressed to Sam, has a little tear on one corner—just enough so that you can see some navy blue under the snowman wrapping paper. 

From shaking it, Sam has deduced, correctly I believe, that it’s a Lego set. So he took out a ruler and measured the dimensions of the box. 

Then he pulled out his handy iPad, logged onto Amazon, and started searching for Lego sets whose boxes match those dimensions and that navy blue color.

He’s narrowed it down to two or three. Detective Sam. 

You need a murder solved, Sam’s your guy. Especially if the motive, weapon, or crime scene itself involved Legos. Otherwise, I imagine he’d give up. To go play with Legos or something.

And Lou kills time by hurling objects across the house. Like he’s literally trying to kill something. We’ve already lost quite a few Christmas ornaments that way. 

Nate’s indoor basketballing doesn’t help that either. 

I don’t know whether the advent calendars make the waiting better or worse. Nate and Sam each got Lego advent calendars with a themed mini figure for each day of December. And Tess got one with a small Disney book for each day. 

Sam, impatient and greedy, opened the contents of his entire calendar on the third day, after much agony.

“Should I just do it? Should I open them all? Or should I wait? Oooh, I can’t decide.”

He was prancing in place in the dining room after school, trying his hardest to peer into the remaining, unopened Advent squares without spoiling the surprises. Delayed gratification isn’t his strong suit.

“Sam. Sam, don’t do it!” Nate was advising from the other side of the room, where he was standing guard over his own calendar.

“Then you won’t have anything to open for the rest of Advent!” Nate was really distraught. Sam’s impulsiveness really concerns him. I foresee similar conversations twenty-five, thirty years from now, as Nate’s trying to convince him to save for retirement instead of buying a boat or a sports car or, God forbid, a new Lego set.

“So you have to think,” I said in my calmest, most rational voice from my seat at the table, barely glancing up from my typing, “what would Future Sam want you to do? If you open them all right now, what would Tomorrow Sam say?”

But before I could even finish my words, the box was being torn apart, and each of the small plastic bags, almost simultaneously, sliced open with scissors. He’s slower than a sloth out in the real world, but when it comes to Legos, he’s a really fast worker.

“Sam, noooooooo!” Nate brought both hands to his face, shaking his head in disgust, as if his Christmas has just been ruined as well.

And so, every morning since, Nate, always the first one down in the mornings—he sets his alarm for 6:30 so he can do his homework—waits for Sam to tumble, reluctantly down the steps. Sam’s in no hurry to get to school.

Once he’s sure Sam’s downstairs and relatively lucid, Nate makes a big spectacle of the Opening of the Advent Calendars. It might as well be Jesus’s actual birth.

“Tess. Shall we?” he says, helping her situate her very large calendar on the table. She’s oblivious to the game he’s playing with Sam, but very excited to see which Disney story book she gets to not read that day.

Sam, used to ignoring Nate’s self-righteousness and manipulation, doesn’t even look up as Nate arranges his growing assortment of Lego mini-figures, narrating the whole process loudly, in an effort to make Sam jealous. 

His efforts have been largely unsuccessful until a few hours ago, when an argument between Lou and Sam somehow spilled over to include Nate as well. Lots of diplomatic relations gone wrong. 

Sam had been threatening to destroy everything Lou holds dear.

“I’m gonna kill your mom and your dad and Tess and Nate,” Sam was taunting Lou, who was mostly ignoring the threats. 

“...and Rocket and the Rescue Bots!”

And that’s when Lou snapped. Sam had taken it too far. Rescue Bots is his new favorite show. As of yesterday, anyway.

Lou can usually manhandle Sam pretty easily, partially because Sam’s the king of psychological warfare, not physical. He’s not really sure how to fight with a 3 year-old. He hesitates to fight back because, obviously, he doesn’t want to actually hurt him. 

Nate, sensing an attack on Sam, went to pile on with his own grievances against him. Until suddenly it became exclusively a Sam Versus Nate battle, with Lou jumping up and down and shrieking alternating yelps of encouragement from the sideline.

And that’s when a battle to microwave each other's Legos ensued. 

Lots of yelling, lots of microwave door slamming, beeping from all the buttons, and Legos smashing to the floor in the scuffle. It was loud and chaotic. 

Thank God no one actually started the microwave. Which was surely intentional on their parts, not a function of their ineptitude. They both know how to heat things up—Nate, his daily bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich, and Sam, his daily hot chocolate. 

Nope, they understand that the last thing we need right now is yet another visit from our friends at the fire station.

But I should probably double-check that there are no errant Legos stranded in the microwave next time I go to nuke some leftover pizza. 

May the anticipation that is the Christmas season continue…

Edit: Minutes after I posted this blog, I caught Lou setting fire to today’s batch of Christmas cards that had just arrived in the mail. Guess I was wrong about that fire department. We might be long overdue for a visit.