Thanksgiving is almost over

And I haven't posted! I can hear the voices of NaBloPoMo calling to me: Alice, Alice, why have you failed us, why…

Like you people are reading. You're not reading. You're sprawled across the sectional, stroking your belly, grunting in satisfaction. Look at you! I've never seen anything like it.

We gorged ourselves over at my sister and brother-in-law's fancy new Brooklyn digs; yes, that's right, as soon as I move out of Brooklyn my sister moves in. I'm pretty sure she did it to taunt me, but it didn't work, because now I get to enjoy her glamorous loft space without paying her glamorous rent, so ha! Ha on her!

Fortunately they brought some Legos with them, so Henry was entertained all day. I think before Legos existed he would have spent his conscious hours bereft, waving his arms in front of him, weeping. Eventually we would watch him connecting invisible tiny pieces of something to each other. And then calling to me to help him disengage certain tiny invisible pieces that he couldn't dislodge from their larger brethren.

45 minutes until tomorrow, crap. And I can't even come up with a single heartfelt sentiment on Thanksgiving, so okay, you want to know what I'm thankful for? I'm thankful for my glorious family, my friends, and I'm thankful for you, you bastards. Stop looking at me like that.

Is it the future already?

Well! Where were we?

Hello, there! Hey! It’s been two weeks since my last post, but 2007 will be all about me not apologizing for everything, so here I am, not apologizing. Je ne regrette rien. I’m like Edith Piaf, except in the countless number of ways I am nothing like Edith Piaf.

Coincidentally, this is the first day Henry has returned to school since the 20th, which was the last time I wrote anything more than a sentence fragment. A lovely break it was, for all concerned. I won’t deny that I had my moments when I longed for delicious freedom, and maybe a minute or two of tasty silence, but all in all my kid has been excellent company. I shall keep him, after all.

As we always do, we celebrated Christmas with my family. (It really comes in handy around the holidays to have a Jewish spouse. I recommend it.) Before the holidays each member of my family called to grill me on Henry’s deepest, most intense desires for Christmas. I told my sister that about some educational, worthy items he would doubtless enjoy in the coming months. There was silence on the other end. “Yeah, we don’t give a crap about that,” she said. “Dominick [my brother-in-law] just wants to get him the one gift that’s going to make him flip out.” Then my mom called to announce that she also wished to work my son up into a hysterical froth. The competition was on.

In the end, he was pretty even-keeled about all the gifts; the light sabers (TWO OF THEM. And they light up!) from my sister and brother-in-law were met with more enthusiasm than my Human Body Encyclopedia, but guess what he spent the week reading? Not the light sabers! He was too busy running around outside whacking trees with those! He received a pocket watch from my mom, which he has enjoyed far more than I believed possible. (Ask him what time it is, and he’ll pull the watch from his pocket, peer into it, and announce, “It’s 20.” Leave it to him to announce the one time that it never is.) And oh my word, the Transformers. So many Transformers. Transformers that I have to transform while Henry lovingly thwaps my skull with his dual light sabers.

Maybe all the head trauma is why it required more brain power than I alone possessed to write my last Wonderland post of 2006. I enlisted Eden’s help, because she’s funny and smart and good, and also because I was so out of practice stringing words together, I needed someone else nudging me along. Reminding me to add punctuation, and so forth.

What else? New Year’s was spent with our best friends, whom we conned into leaving the city and staying over at our place. Suckers! We made linguine with clam sauce and then spent the evening geeking out on YouTube. Watching things like "Saints Row Bugs: The Musical." We are a thrilling group. At least we managed to stay awake until midnight. That’s something, isn’t it? Hello?

And now here I am. It’s 2007, and I’m still not living on Mars. This future is nothing like I thought it would be, and yet it’s so much better.

Here I am!

Hey there! Hey, you! How was your Thanksgiving? Was it good? Mine was good, too!

We hosted Thanksgiving this year for our in-laws. So drunk were we on our relatively roomy new house and our ability to own more than four wine glasses, we actually believed we could put together a well-rounded Thanksgiving meal. Shockingly, we were right. By some miracle, I cooked a twenty-pound turkey that tasted like turkey, and not like tree bark. (In this I was aided by my brother-in-law, who stuck the thermometer into various parts of the turkey as I huddled in the corner, shrieking I JUST DON’T WANT TO POISON EVERYONE.) Many side dishes were also composed and enjoyed, all without incident. My baby niece was just as adorable as I remembered, and I managed to hold her without gnawing at her cheeks, which took considerable strength of will.

The only mishap occurred the day before, when I heated the oven to bake the pumpkin pie, having forgotten that the day before I had sprayed some oven cleaner in there. The kind of oven cleaner that says WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T HEAT UP THE OVEN WITH THIS IN IT all over the canister. I would have paid attention to this, were I able to read. What I needed was a picture of a toy poodle on its back with x’s where its eyes should be and its little pink tongue hanging out, but the E-Z-Off people didn’t care about my needs. So I almost killed us all.

Fortunately I noticed the foamy quality of the oven’s insides mere moments after turning it on, so instead of dying I only had to wipe away some hot oven cleaner. This was the most exciting thing that happened all week. The End.

And now, friends, my mind is cast inexorably toward the last hurdle of 2006, that being The Christ Child’s Birthday, Wherein We All Flirt With Poverty To Praise Jesus. My son, who was so articulate regarding his birthday wishes, now will only tell me that he wants “cool stuff.” He seems to feel that Santa will know what this means, as Santa is all-knowing. Sadly, his mother doesn’t know a thing. And there’s a disconnect between what he claims to like and what he actually plays with for more than five minutes. If I give him a puzzle, he will shrug and ask for the next gift, but then play with that puzzle every day until I want to burn the puzzle. Whereas if I buy him a militia of Power Rangers, his head will explode with joy, and the next day the Power Rangers will be dumped in his Enormous Bin of Guys, to be next seen in the Spring of Aught Eight. Oh, what’s a mother to do?

A brief account of the festivities.

The piñata was one of those pull-the-string dealies, after all. I had no idea. When I bought it I assumed all those ribbons at the bottom were a festive touch. Then I saw the words “PULL-THE-STRING PINATA,” and after a few minutes of sounding it out I figured out what was up. It’s amazing I can get through the day without setting myself on fire.

The actual pulling open of the piñata was anticlimactic. The children quickly lost patience with the idea of taking turns with one ribbon each, so after one round of that we gave up and Henry yanked all of them. At this a small door opened at the bottom and exactly nothing fell out. I had to reach in and fish out the candy and toys. Piece by piece they thunked to the floor. Most of the kids were around Henry’s age or younger, and were impressed with the goings-on but didn’t fully grok that they could take more than one item. They each picked up one sticker or fun-sized candy and ambled away, asking their parents if they could really keep it. Henry grabbed a lollipop and was pleased. The lone six-year-old, the most senior party attendee and apparently a seasoned pro at the piñata, was down there grabbing everything, unable to believe her good fortune. The preschoolers sat back and admired her technique.

After the day was over, we sat down and realized there had been no tears, no bloodshed, no missing limbs. My newly minted four-year-old managed nearly ten hours of festivities (there were two parties in one day: the morning one with the kids, then the evening appearance of the grandparents and aunts and uncles) with style and grace. He greeted his guests with enthusiasm, said “thank you” to each gift, and invited his friends to share his loot. At one point he got a Woody doll and spent the night observing, “I used to have a tiny Woody but now I have a really big Woody!” We all tried not to snicker, and failed. We tried to resist the urge to get him to say it again, and failed at that too.

So in other words, all the misbehavior came from the adults.