Thursday, July 06, 2006

A Super-Hero Day



Having a 5 year old nephew exhausts keeps me young. My brother lives an hour away so I don't get to see my boy more than a few times a month. Sunday Dinner or the occasional Kyle Day. Kyle Days with Aunt Laudie start at 7:45 am and last until well after 5 pm. By 2 pm I'm generally reminded how happy relieved I am that I get to spoil him rotten with adoring aunt-like attention he deserves . . . And then give him back!

Our latest day together thankfully landed on a day the sun decided to shine, allowing us to go outside and play. One of the many toys (most of them pink!) left over from the days when his cousins were young is a Pink Wand. Originally designed to spew velcro-backed Gems to the hair of a Princess (Gem?) Doll, it has now transformed itself into a magic wand to fight evil Shadow Villains. The villains our Super-Hero fought this day all lived in the Shadows and we Super Hero's lived only in the Sun.

So we ran from shade tree to shade tree slaying the bad guys.
Followed by Super-Dog sidekick and digital camera toting blogger/aunt. (I was told NO photo allowed on the swing but our hero relented with "Just one" when told how sad it would make Steph if she couldn't see pictures from home.

Yeah, playing the Steph card works every time and I'm not ashamed to use it!!

As a mom with two daughters 21 & 23, I fully understand the hard part is over. They are now wonderful additions to Womankind and I'm pretty proud to have had a hand in how they turned out!

And as for Sunday dinner at Gram's, it's a tradition my mother holds onto fiercely.
She cooks. We should come eat it. This has never been a problem:
A) I don't have to cook.
B) When the girls were little, they got to visit their Grandparents.
C) Their Dad gets the house to himself for a little while.

Sunday Lunch at Gram's has always worked out well.
A) being the overwhelming number-one reason I see for going . . . But there you go.

Lunch is pretty much always followed by a hard fought game of Scrabble.
Oldest daughter Sara tends to win the most these days, what with 4 years of high school Latin & a Chemical Engineering degree (suma cum laude, thank you very much! Currently working on the UMaine ethanol Research project to help save the world :) She's a self-confessed cut throat Scrabble player. (Consults with the official dictionary a little too often, if we don't keep our eye on her.)

Recent game:
Having just given away the fact that my 4 letters that were left spelled GETS - as in the person who goes out GETS a one-hundred point bonus! - she offered a little help. (I would be known for often trying to make up Laurie Rules to increase my score, but they never seem to go for it?) Sara not only pointed out a word I could make but where to put it in order to go out.
She confessed afterwards her help was based entirely on the desire to keep her Grandmother from having one last turn and possibly getting enough points to go ahead in the game. I told her she was going to hell for this latest and most extreme cut throat behavior.
Her grandmother didn't hear this confession, but what with our rolling on the floor laughing our asses off, explanations were due. The truth is out!

Steph is off following her dream to be writer/editor, Interning with Scholastic Books this summer in NY. This blog actually is (mostly) about keeping in touch with my youngest kid while she's away- so we call it the Mom Blog. She pointed out in a recent comment that to actually qualify as a Mom Blog (by her new Scholastic standards) I need to post embarrassing pictures of my children as tots and describe outrageous comments they may have made in public.

I could point out that most embarrassing or outrageous moments would have been Steph's doing as a child! She'll be back home for a last year of college at UMaine in the fall.
(And to help kick butt at Scrabble as well :)

3 comments:

laurie in maine said...

Yes. You are correct that this particular memory had me wishing the ground might open up and swallow (us) there & then. One SHOULD NOT ask daughter if she picked the biggest freakin pair of earrings she could find (at the $ store) only to look up and a see stranger wearing equally large earrings walking straight at us in the parking lot...thinking I was speaking to her.

laurie in maine said...

No, one should not :)

Sheepish Annie said...

Glad to hear that the evil-doers have been vanquished. Does your nephew do any work with ants or dentists? Just curious...not that I wish my dentist vanquished. That would be wrong.