Making family life a little bit less of a waste land

We had to work WAY too hard to give away this changing table – still in perfectly good shape – to someone who could use it.

While in the midst of another holiday season, the phrase “waste not, want not” has been rolling around my head a lot.

I’m doing pretty well with the second part. Really. Whether it’s a consequence of the perspective that comes with middle age, or with witnessing friends and family members struggle through a recession, or with really taking to heart Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s existential pep talks on the recent “Cosmos” reboot, I’ve now arrived at a place where, when my oldest daughter asks each Christmas, “How come Santa didn’t bring you anything?” I answer, “Well, I’m really, really lucky. I have the things I need, so I told Santa he didn’t need to worry about me.”

And he doesn’t. Joe and I have been fortunate enough to hang on to our jobs through a rough economic time, so we have what we need, and we’re grateful.

But you know what makes the “waste not” thing nearly impossible? Young kids.

Our ludicrously late Easter Bunny

A fitting image, given how late our Easter Bunny was with the eggs this year.

This past Monday, the day after Easter, just before walking to pick up the kids from preschool, I shoved chocolate kisses and eggs into plastic eggs and walked around our front- and backyard, hurriedly placing them near just-blooming flowers, trees, the trampoline – everywhere.

Why? Because even though I’d been patting myself on the back Saturday evening – I’d picked up a few dollar items from Target days earlier in order to make modest Easter baskets for both Lily and Neve – the girls awoke on Sunday morning, and after seeing the baskets, Lily excitedly said, “We have to find the eggs the Easter Bunny hid!”

A stomach-plummeting, “oh, sh*t” parenting moment, to say the least.

“Uh, I don’t know,” I said, looking across the kitchen at Joe, who grimaced. “I don’t think I’ve seen any eggs this morning. Maybe the Easter Bunny hasn’t had the chance to hide eggs here yet. He’s got lots and lots of baskets to deliver.”

Lily looked puzzled, and I understood why. Not the best quick-on-your-feet explanation, Mom.

How a 2 year old salvaged a holiday traveling nightmare (no, I’m not kidding)

Much of this blog, inevitably, concentrates on the struggles and difficulties of raising a little one. (Wouldn’t be much of a blog if I regularly posted things like, “This parenting thing’s a breeze! No problems here, no sir!”) But after the day my little family and I had today, I felt compelled to share the way Lily, our 2 year old daughter, managed to make a pretty crummy, delay-riddled day of travel into a tolerable, downright relaxing experience.

In order to celebrate Christmas with my family, Joe, Lily and I had traveled to my father’s home in North Carolina late last week. We’ve done this for many years now (since my parents retired to NC in the late ’90s), and we’re accustomed to getting off the plane to find warmer (than Michigan) temps and sunshine. So it never dawned on us to check the weather forecast before leaving this year. Aren’t there already enough details to worry about during the holidays?

So imagine our surprise as we watched, through the windows in my father’s house, six or more inches of snow accumulate on Christmas Day. Now, I knew from my two-year grad school stint at the University of Georgia that snow both excites and terrifies many folks who live south of the Mason-Dixon line, and judging by the local television coverage of the storm, this notion certainly seemed to apply to the people of Western North Carolina. But Joe and I soon became far more wrapped up in the snow’s consequences for us, specifically. As we checked in on the multiple flight cancellations out of Asheville that day, and heard forecasts calling for another couple of inches of snow the next day (when we were scheduled to fly home), our hearts sank. It’s one thing to be staring down a delay or an isolated cancellation on a regular day; it’s another thing entirely to wonder how an extremely large, upset backlog of people, all of whom would (understandably) be scrambling and jockeying for spots on outgoing flights in the coming days, would eventually all get to their destination – us included.