Beren deMotier * writer * artist * human

Holidays

Hot Gluing My Way Through the Holidays

Last night, at midnight, long after the kids were in bed and I should have folded myself in either my wife’s sleepy embrace or the pages of a good novel, I found myself hot gluing teeny tiny pinecones to a Styrofoam cone. And though my glue gun felt good in my hand, weighty, like a hammer for the tool-impaired, I had to wonder, how did it ever get this crazy?

When I look around our home, I see the detritus of children. It is parenthood, not the Marines, that makes you be all that you can be. Parenthood isn’t only the ultimate endurance sport, it’s the ultimate horizon expander, and my horizon needed some serious expansion before I had kids.

Once upon a time we were these young lesbians who fell in love and lived in a cozy roach infested apartment a stone’s throw from the local lesbian hangout, and Boom! twelve years pass and we’re cutting down Christmas trees with two awe-struck children standing by and hot-gluing at midnight.

To read the entire article, click on Hot Gluing My Way Through the Holidays

THE TREE HAS LEFT THE BUILDING

I am pleased to announce the tree has left the building. I have enjoyed another glorious holiday season.

Without killing anyone.

And I’m not one of those “I-Hate-Christmas-it’s-all-a-commercial-racket-the-Grinch-was-right” kind of people either. I love the whole thing, really I do, but even if you’re a ho ho fan, and I’d go so far as to call myself a Christmaholic, between the baking, the shopping, the wrapping, the visiting, the cleaning, the Napoleonic making of plans, it’s enough to get anyone committed.

Of course in our case it’s complicated by the fact that we don’t live in a nice, controllable, convenient, modern apartment where cleaning is something you do with a quick vacuum and a bottle of Windex. We had to get an older house (read “fixer upper”) with lots of room. For mess. You name it, there’s stuff there.

We’ve also blessed our lives with two lovable children who come down with something, like clockwork, starting the day before any vacation time my wife has, and miraculously return to good health the day before she has to go back to work. It’s generally something serious enough to make us anxious but not so serious as to distract us entirely from all the things we’re not accomplishing on our Virgo lists or are missing due to our own personal household plague.

And on top of that we feel compelled to further complicate our lives by entertaining non-stop (between illnesses) during the holidays and not hole up in a cabin in Vermont like any intelligent soul.

To read the entire article, click on The Tree Has Left the Building

The Ice Pick Incident

It has been years since we decorated our home for the holidays with a human wrecking ball on the loose. Our toddler is the reason baby gates were invented, though he can be seen figuring out the locking mechanisms during his free moments, which he otherwise fills by scaring us to death.

Admittedly, the last time we had a child this age, we always knew where she was. On my hip. I carried her until she was five. Luckily, she was travel size, for my convenience. She also, in the way of the majority of girls, had more impulse-control and self-preservation instinct than both of our boys, though I do recall her taking out her fair share of breakables.

The whole “wrecking ball” phenomenon may be a birth order issue. Our older son had more common sense at this age than our present boy wonder. He figured out quickly that if you fall off the chair you are climbing on, it hurts, so perhaps you should avoid climbing it again. The middle child was too busy watching the older one to get into too much trouble. But our youngest seems to feel any pain is worth the adventure, and has shrugged off any number of bruises, abrasions, and bloody lips in his desire to know where everything in the house is located, and how to use it, because he is convinced he is as competent as any of the rest of us.

To read the entire article, click on The Ice Pick Incident

HALLOWEEN 1995