The Not a Christmas Letters, Part 2

This was the second of the Not a Christmas Letters, published to family and friends.

THIS IS STILL NOT A CHRISTMAS LETTER

I am hurtling through the air upside down. I can see the finish line, but I know that I will never reach it. I’m not totally sure what happened – a moment ago I was leading, cruising to victory. Now I’m going to end up third – the daughter has blown me up. She actually hung back in second place so she could blow me up right before the finish line.  Mario Kart Double Dash is the crusher of dreams. There’s probably a metaphor in here somewhere. I expressed incredulousness at Rowan’s newfound cunning to Jan – she just looked at me, kind of rolled her eyes, and said “Dear, she’s been playing with boys”.

Crap.

A couple of snapshots from the year:

vacation

In October, in a shocking display of bad parenting, we took the children out of school to go on vacation to the Caribbean.

“Mr. Walrath, we noticed that Connor wasn’t in school last week – is something wrong?”

“Ummm – he wasn’t feeling well?

“He seems fine. He also seems to be sporting a tan and a puka shell necklace.”

”Ummm…hey, that reminds me – we got you a carved stone stingray and a coconut bead necklace and bracelet set. I really have to run, but we’ll see you at the next conference!”

the difference between girls and boys

On cruises, they make you towel animals at turndown service. It’s one of those weird cruise things, like the over-the-top elaborate Gala buffet, which seem neat in context but which would be incredibly weird in real life.

“Look honey, it’s a scale representation of the Temple of Syrinx carved entirely from radishes!”

“Look dear, they make us a, ummmmm, I think it’s an anteater out of towels!”

Anyway, we finish up with dinner and head back to the cabins. The daughter and the boy run ahead to see what towel animal they got today. They open the door, and….

Daughter: “Ooooh, it’s a bunny!

The Boy: “Soon to be a mutant bunny!”

And then he put nine more eyes on it.

pursuits of leisure

The boy will not ride the bicycle without training wheels. Actually, he’s not so thrilled about riding it with training wheels either. It’s kind of like those Calvin and Hobbes cartoons where Calvin would try to sneak up on the bicycle and it would tackle him – kind of like Snoopy and the lawn chair in A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.

There has been a lot of dancing this year. The daughter is dancing. The boy is dancing. Twice, I swear I saw two of the cats start to break into a choreographed routine. Up to six days a week are spent at Boni’s Dance Studio and Black Hole of Performing Arts. There are Nutcracker rehearsals and competition dance thingies and lots and lots of emails about the best place to buy purple Lycra bellbottoms and things like that. I now know what a snood is.

I think I have a hotel room booked at the Galleria sometime in January for an assorted dance function. I work down the street from the Galleria – I don’t think I should have to stay in hotels there on weekends too. I’m going to go to the hotel bar while I’m there – I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a bunch of middle-aged guys hunched over their beers, looking slightly downcast, nostalgic for the days when they could just mow the lawn or work on the car on a Saturday or something.

Jan managed to work her way into Mitchell this year by designing and leading a team to do a full-on pirate-decorating theme across five walls at LC5. I think that the hardest part was probably keeping the wretches chained to the wall –apparently there’s a whole bunch of labor standards which apply to wretches. The hermit Kraken was a hit, though.

On the Powell front, she did co-design and set up the stage design in the spring and again in the fall. The tradeoff was as follows – in exchange for countless hours spent on the stages, we got to jettison a whole host of fabric and related materials we had accumulated.

“Dear, where’s the Prince Greatest Hits CD?”

“I think it’s under a pile of fabric.”
”And the cat?”
”Try under the pile on the right. And why do you need the Prince Greatest Hits CD?”

“Ummm…I want to party like it’s 1999?”

Probably one of the stranger moments of the Year in YMCA came at Camp Cullen. The Makah tribe was at dinner, thinking as a group how we could maybe get out of doing a skit at the campfire.

“Maybe would could fake a stomach virus!”

“No, we did that last year”
”Darn.”

Suddenly, a boyish voice – then another, then another. Out of nowhere, they’re singing:

Who woulda thought that a girl like me
Would double as a superstar
You get the best of both worlds
Chill it out, take it slow
Then you rock out the show
You get the best of both worlds
Mix it all together
And you know that it's the best

You get the best of both worlds
Without the shades and the hair
You can go anywhere
You get the best of both girls
Mix it all together...oh yeah
It's so much better
'Cause you know you've got
The best of both worlds

Yes, all of the boys are singing the Hannah Montana theme. I look around and raise my eyebrows. Carey volunteers, “Zachary watches a lot of Disney Channel!” Go figure. They then decide to do, as their skit, as much of a Jesse McCartney song as anyone can remember. They go outside to practice. They’re figuring out their look, their moves - they’re a boy band. They perform the song as their skit at the campfire to applause (everybody) and puzzled looks (me). The following Monday, a girl at Connor’s school asks him if they were really singing that. Sometimes I’m just waiting for the hidden camera to pop out.

Intellectual pursuits

Early this summer I became the proud recipient of the “Why I should get a pet hermit crab for my birthday” essay, authored by the Daughter.  This was followed by the acquisition of a big tank-thing, a lid for said tank-thing, and various bags of loam, pieces of wood, shells, and one potential occupant of said shells. Things don’t always go quite as planned – about a month later, I received the “Dwarf Hamsters” Powerpoint presentation. At least it’s good for her marketing skills. I promised her I wouldn’t tell the vet school admissions people about the hermit crab. Or the frog. Or the fish. It’ll just be our secret – shhhhhh. I know that every 11 year old girl wants to be a vet, but if by some miracle she doesn’t shake the idea, I think she should do large-animal stuff – it seems like they’d be way harder to kill.

Last night was “Read books about dragons stealthily by a concealed light source until 12:30 a.m. and be rather cranky the following day” night for the Daughter. She has been sporadically working on her own literary opus, also about dragons.  She takes this seriously, even doing background research. A couple of months ago I came upon her in the study, clicking through websites and making notes.

“Honey, what are you doing”
”I’m researching dragon facts”

“Ummm…. Okay honey, have fun”

Dragons – so hot right now. They’re like pirates for 2007.

I think that children today are probably two years ahead of where I was in school growing up. I have to constantly think of the Daughter’s stuff as being more like eighth grade than sixth grade work.  Soon, we will come to the point where she asks for help on her work, and when she describes the problem, only wah-wah wah-wah noises will come out, like the adults in a Charlie Brown holiday special. I will then exit the room, clutching my head and mumbling, “I was told there would be no math”. I’m pretty sure she’s already started to make up questions just to mess with me

“Dad, if two trains leave the station at the same time, and one’s in Philadelphia, and one’s in Tucson, and they’re each traveling at the speed of light, what color will they refract?”
”Ummm – turquoise?  Is there an example?”

Please keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times,

j.