How things have changed

We spent the early part of this week in Toronto, visiting these guys. We don't get there all that often and my sister is on maternity leave right now - meaning that with a few days off work, it was the perfect time for me to go. We didn't do much - rode the subway around town a bit, much to Liam's delight, and hung out at the park on a warm spring morning. It's still nice to be at an age where it doesn't take much to impress.
Liam and Mallory shared a bed during this trip, which is probably not the best way to do things. Liam was clearly exhausted at the end of the day, having skipped his nap entirely. Mallory skipped most of hers too, but when I put them to bed together, she thought it was time for a sleepover party. It took nearly an hour for her to stop talking to him, jumping on him, wrestling with him, and otherwise provoking him. He practically had his head stuffed under the pillow, trying to drown her out. At one point she started wailing and I headed back in to her, expecting to find that she had fallen out of bed. Nope - "Liam did something!" she wailed, which is her code for letting me know that he hit her/pulled her hair/bit her/took something away from her. It's likely that he clocked her, and I can't really blame him for doing it.

We got back to town last night and the kids had enough time for a good visit with Dad before bed. We were eating dinner in Toronto on Monday night when Mallory suddenly looked up from her plate and asked, "Where's Dad?" Dad had to stay home and work this week, so he didn't make the trip with us.

After the kids were in bed, Chad went out for some green beers for St. Patrick's day, and I stayed home to do some sewing after taking a couple of days off. It's funny... he went to a restaurant for these drinks, a restaurant that used to be a roadhouse, and I was just at that restaurant a few weeks ago remarking that I can still remember being there when it was still a roadhouse, drinking green beer on St. Patrick's Day in 1993 when I was 17. The rest of the grade 13 class (Chad included) were on the not-officially-sanctioned grad trip to Jamaica, and I wasn't allowed to go. My parents were afraid of what kind of trouble I could get up to in Jamaica, I suppose, which is kind of ironic. Bar hopping at the age of 17 makes it obvious that I could get up to no good at home, too. I can imagine my parents having several hernias apiece as they read this, though it was really only the tip of the iceberg with respect to what I was up to in high school. But it's all water under the bridge now, right? Look at me now: I have become the kind of person who stays home on St. Patrick's Day to get some sewing done. Let's be glad that I got the wild child business out of my system when I did.