As my daughter put it, now that Thanksgiving is out of the way, now we’re on to Christmas.

It’s going to be a long month, and an expensive one, so I set the kids to work helping me come up with things about our family that could be frustrating if they weren’t funny, with the hope that we’ll be able to find humor in other things, too, as things inevitably get more stressful.

Topping our list is part of our routine, completely random Hangman, which is the only type of Hangman you can play when the person in control is just learning how to read and spell. It’s way more fun than regular Hangman, and it drives home how difficult English is. My 6-year-old read “cute” as “cootie” and my 13-year-old laughed until he realized he wasn’t sure how to spell “cootie.”

On other reading matters:

• My son constantly talks me into reading fantasy books with him, then drops the series midway through, something I’m incapable of doing no matter how bad it is.

• My daughter reads aloud every night, one word at a time, making for some interesting rhythm. I love listening to it, but she doesn’t always love when I echo her.

• My son, on the other hand, reads above grade level, which is why it’s so hard to understand why it was the lowest grade on his report card, especially since he’s proved himself a decent essay writer when he wants to be, offering a convincing argument for pushing his bedtime back a half-hour instead of arguing every night.

• My daughter’s insecurity over any suggestion that her brother reads better than she does, even though he’s seven years older, and is expected to read better than she does.

My son said I’m not allowed to use his shorthand for No. 2, which is essentially our inability to finish a conversation because all three of us are easily distracted. After a week of trying to get an answer from the kids on what they want to do on vacation, all I know is that they’re both disappointed about not being able to go to Europe. Boo-hoo.

My daughter doesn’t find much humor in the next one, although everyone else can’t help but smile when she talks about her “enemies” who are all fancier than her. I’d say she’s too young for enemies, but actually, I suppose I’m actually just too old to bother with declaring someone my enemy.

I suggested that she brush her hair to be fancier, which led us off on a different tangent — my son’s urgent need a haircut before his do went all Zac Efron, which led into my daughter’s desire to dye her hair purple, which veered off into a discussion about the temporarily misplaced temporary purple hairspray, which brings me to...

I love that my daughter is generous and that she was so moved by a Operation Christmas Child video that she convinced her brother and me to help her pack shoe boxes. She love, love, loves giving things away, which is great, until I noticed last week that she’d given away several pairs of my shoes after finding a loophole in the rule “if a new pair of shoes comes in, an old pair has to go out.” Needless to say, I’m not the one who got new shoes.

But, I feel good going into the shopping season because after a couple years of talking to them about the importance of giving, they actually came up with things they wanted to give before contemplating what they want to find under the tree.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 at 5:22 am and is filed under Family Tree, activities, gifts, holidays, kids books, parent, shopping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.