Hanna, Ellie and I had a rare couple of hours alone while Greg bribed Chloe into thinking a trip to the Home Depot and riding in a cart shaped like a car would make her the envy of her preschool. As expected, she returned unimpressed and I scraped her tongue of all DNA from the other car-buff kids who had suffered a similar fate.
It gave the two older girls and me a chance to play Monopoly Junior without anyone tossing the money in the air and using her underwear as a net to catch it or attempting to do a summersault through the middle of the pile of “Chance” cards.
It wasn’t the board game that impressed me. It was being able to have an honest conversation with my kids without any distractions.
We covered a wide and varied range of topics, from Hanna discussing her medieval studies at school and introducing me to the word “vassal” which I assured her was a mispronunciation of the word “vessel” or “Vaseline” or maybe even “asshole” until with some encouragement, we googled it and for the first time (and certainly not the last) my child had given me reason to anxiously await the New York Times crossword puzzle Saturday morning because you just know the first clue is going to be “dependent landholder in feudal society” (6 letters) and I was going to write vassal in real ink and not the invisible pens I usually use when I attempt that puzzle.
Ellie would ask things like, “Mommy, give me a topic, it can be anything in the universe and I can sing a song about it.”
Me: Okay, how about heart? (I was saving vassal for her encore)
Ellie: No, I would have picked something really weird like golf or China.
Hanna told me she had learned about a scary disease she hopes she never gets. She said you get it from thinking you’re fat. It’s called in excelsis. It took everything in me not to add “deo.” There’s also one that starts with a “b” that makes you throw up.
Me: Yes, I’ve heard of both of those but we don’t have anything to worry about. Those diseases don’t run in our family.
We celebrated with a three-way fist-bump and called the game a three way tie.
It was a simple way to spend the evening, no distractions, just quality time, long overdue.
I tucked the girls into their beds and all seemed right with the world.
“Goodnight my little vassals.”
Chloe threw her underwear at me.
