The girls’ last day of school prior to the Winter Break was Friday, December 15^th.  The first week they were off, it was just me and the girls.  The second week, my wife was off work and home with us.  At the end of the week, my mother died.  The girls went back to school on Tuesday, January 2nd.  Then, they were off for my mother’s funeral on Friday, January 5^th.  We are currently in the middle of a full, five-day week.  Then, there’s no school on Monday, January 15^th for Martin Luther King Day.  And finally, there’s a four-day week at the end of the month, where the girls have January 26^th off for either my birthday or the end of the second quarter.  I’m working on the assumption that it’s for my birthday. 

During the first few days of the break, the girls were a little wild.  They got along well, most of the time.  There was a lot of loud, silly, running around the house.  Audio was too busy playing with Dee Dee that she didn’t get around to asking for her iPad until it was bedtime!  Audio also practiced swearing quite a bit during that week.  I ignored it for the most part and it went away the following week.  I played some board games with Dee Dee.  She’s better at some games than others and she gets rather upset when she loses.  We rarely play the same game twice in a row.  Luckily, we usually end on Battleship, because she usually beats me.  During summer breaks, it’s taken the three us a couple weeks to get into a routine with a good pace for everyone.  I figured the first week of this two-week break would be tiring, and it was. 

Christmas came and went, and everyone survived.  But the week that followed was filled with playing with toys and fighting over toys and toys being taken away and hidden in closets because they lit up, blinked, neighed, and played songs.  And that’s just one of the toys!  When not playing together, Audio started a keychain collection and Dee Dee listened to music on the MP3 player that she got for Christmas last year.  Another thing that made Dee Dee happy was that, at her request, we went to a taqueria on the other side of town.  At the end of the week we visited my parents, who live a couple hours’ drive away for the day.  I learned that my dad had brought my mother to the hospital on Saturday, and then he called me on Sunday morning to tell me she was dead. 

I spent much of the next week on the phone.  The girls spent the days at school on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. My mother’s funeral was on Friday.  Both girls behaved as well as I could have hoped while we were at the visitation, funeral, and lunch.  They both looked especially cute and were very engaged with some of the family and friends who attended the funeral.  Dee Dee knew what was going on but was mostly sad that between COVID-19 and dementia, she never really got to know my mother.  Audio didn’t understand what was happening, but she got very serious and a little pale when I told her to imagine never seeing her mom ever again. 

This week started out all right.  But it was colder than it’s been so far this winter.  We signed Dee Dee up to be in a play with the friend from school who she’s in class with, in scouts with, and has playdates with.  That started on Monday afternoon.  It’s through the Community Education program in the city to the north of us, but it’s only about a ten-minute drive to get there from our house.  That’s especially good because her rehearsals are currently on Mondays and Wednesdays, and she will have swimming lessons on Wednesday nights starting next week.  The pool is a five-minute drive south of our house, and Dee Dee’s lesson starts twenty-five minutes after her play rehearsal ends.  If things go well, we should arrive just in time for me to meet my wife at the locker room door to trade Dee Dee for Audio, who will have just finished her swimming lesson and changed out of her swimsuit and into her clothes.  My wife and I have been wondering when the wild world of youth activities would start for our family.  Apparently, it starts this week.