It’s been five days since teeny baby Paisley and her family moved out. We’re down to two dogs on our floor because Huxley, the quiet one, moved to the suburbs. Paisley’s folks will be building a home in the country.
There are seven very nice apartments up here. Our old dog Zoe (90 in “people years”) was the only dog for years and made sure everyone was safe. For a while we had three dogs here. Now it’s just Zoe and her old blind pal, Mr. B.
Imagine that with so few homes we’d have two pregnant ladies! Granted, Paisley’s mom moved. Another bairn (Scots for baby, see “wee bairn” in my Aunt’s, the retired English teacher’s bathroom). I had to find a word, pronounce it correctly, spell it and use it in a sentence every time I used the powder room!
My neighbors with blind Mr. B are due for a blessed event this month. They’re doing great. Over the days I see a number of packages at their door. Some look like flat packs. I see them from down the hall and think of IKEA and other flat pack furniture that comes with a crummy Allen wrench.
Then my mind goes to a couple of years hence when baby boy/girl sees a tricycle and points and says “Mommy, Daddy, I want that!” Then the inevitable happens. Parents buy the tricycle in a flat pack and do what my parents told me decades later.
They stayed up until 4 a.m. (at least Dad did) putting together the metal kitchen for me, assembling the mini car race track for my brother. I always wondered why my parents were so tired at six o’clock Christmas morning.
Soon they started buying us sweaters and socks plus one small special item each, then getting a family gift for the basement (nice big room, windows, fireplace et al) like a ping pong table one year, air hockey the next. As I recall they always said the sweaters et al were from Mom and Dad, the special gift for all was from Santa. All of a sudden, my parents weren’t so tired Christmas morning.
They did start a tradition, however, one worth preserving. Every year Mom went out and got us kids themed ornaments for the tree. She never liked those glass balls that broke into 1,000 pieces except for “filler” on the tree. Often she marked the kid’s initial and year on the back. When we went off to college she gave each one of us a box with our own ornaments to start our own tree.
I do not know where many of my old ornaments are but my husband and I will soon be married 14 years and I try to get us matching ornaments on a theme of where we’ve lived (lassos and bagpipes,snowmen and a moose on a sled, vastly different ornaments, of course). It provides a family history. “Oh, that’s the year were were in ….”
Cheers and help maintain and create traditions, food and more, in your home. Food is sustenance, and family. Dee
ps The racetrack was 8’x15′ and in the basement. Electric, with strips underneath the car to connect to the track. Two cars, one blue, light and fast. One white, a bit heavier and slower. I was always white and always won. When blue tried to beat me it was so light that on the turns it flew off the track and cost time. I went fast on the straightaways and slow around the turns and the tortoise won the race. D
Cooking with Dee 
Now that I think about it they farmed out stockings! We each had to blindly reach for a name and fill a stocking for a sibling for under $20. Kids changed the game, too, so after Christmas Eve dinner we’d open stockings and find out the name of our “secret Santa.” I routinely spent more than $20 but the recipient was always happy with my choices. It was the first time in my life, in college, when I learned what my little brother had known all along, they didn’t forgive me then, but I knew that my little brother and sisters would always like to have me as their stocking patron. Don’t ask permission, ask forgivness. If caught.