Back when I was single and on the prowl, New Year’s Eve usually meant I would sit at home alone and watch TV until midnight. I didn’t drink then and all of my friends were usually paired off and going to do “romantic” things in which I had no interest.
Flash forward to New Years 1998. I had a fiancée. She had a kid. We sat at home and watched TV until midnight. A few years later and that kid is sitting up with us, playing Scrabble and getting sucked into the Twilight Zone marathon on Sci Fi. She’s a good kid.
Scrabble is a dangerous game in our house. The wife and I tend to get angry over words and there have been more than a few occasions where the game was banned for months at a time. True, she always wins. But that’s because she becomes verbally abusive over her contention that the word that I used is not part of common language. We should get an official Scrabble dictionary, but it wouldn’t help. Hell, the only thing that would make us happy is to use the OED and an Anglo-Saxon Dictionary.
New Year’s started early for us. To be precise it started at 12:01 on the 31st. Young Gertrude suddenly woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep. Mom brought her in bed with us and this kid was wired like a crack addict in Rush Limbaugh’s bathroom. She was peel-her-off-the-ceiling-wired. And babbling non-stop.
At 12:10 she started patting her mother on the cheek.
“Don’t cry mommy,” she’d say. “I love you.”
“I’m not crying,” Mom would say. “Go to sleep.”
By 12:20 she had made this comment 12,453 times.
By 12:25 I was getting a little irritated. So I rolled over to tell her to be quiet and go to sleep.
“Gertrude,” I said, putting my arm around her, “go to sle—“
“BLORK!” She puked all over my arm, all over the comforter and all over mom.
“I sorry,” she said. “I not be sick anymore.”
It was true. She was running a fever and it seemed like she had gagged on her own snot (lovely!).
So we nursed her well for the next few days. That is to say, we gave her medicine and she would rebound back into this strange delirium that we couldn’t describe. I suppose it was some sort of fever-induced weirdness. But she was a nut for the rest of the weekend.
For example, yesterday she came running into the kitchen and screamed, “I like socks!” We were all very happy for her love of foot coverings.
But her biggest regret this year was being banned from candy. Between Christmas morning and this weekend she had perfected a stealthy creep that would allow her to steal candy from the stockings. We suspected her creeping, but could never catch her doing it. Finally, mom took away the stockings.
“Aw, Mom” she cried, “that’s not fair!”
“No, Gert. You’ve had too much sugar.”
“I NEED my sugar,” she yelled.
It was to no avail. In order to make her happy, I gave her a soy shake that I drink. It’s chocolaty and yummy. She thought it was a treat, not knowing it was good for her.
“Whaddisit?”
“It’s a shake. It has isoflavones in it.”
“I like isoflavones.”
So, keep that in mind. To make my daughter happy all you need is a pair of socks and something loaded with isoflavones.
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