I colored wads of paper and taped them up, just for you

…and the end of the message said, “and Daddy, I love you very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very much.”

On my way to work I saw people on the side of the highway, digging out beneath plowed mountains of snow. A cold Colorado morning, sky clear as ice, you have to keep moving just to stay warm and digging out a car derelict for the past two or three days seems worthy of a few Slim Jims and a shitload of coffee after everything’s back on the road. Considering Manitou was hardly hit at all, I felt a little guilty driving by the intrepid rabble scooping stacks of shit on the side of the highway.

We stayed inside during the blizzard, played games, cleaned house by ever diminishing degrees, tussled and tickled each other and lots of pasta, watched cartoons and shared candy. We traded laps and listened to Mozart at the end of the night, made up goofy poems and pretended we were dinosaurs. As you saw from the title of my last post, I thought we’d be gnawing on each other’s bones by the end of the ordeal but I’m blessed, I know it – I have good kids. They’re fun and creative and not vindictive, not selfish, like they know we’re all in this together and we might as well make the most of it.

If there’s anything I’ve become aware of since I started taking this medication it’s that there are angels all around me, beating wings brushing air across my shoulders and cheeks. Mamacita sends packages of presents to My Kids and my kids, spends time with my eldest on the phone to boost my big girl’s sense of who she is. Random friends and readers send me huge packages of love, encouragement, comments and emails.

The tree we have is two foot high, a tiny thing sitting on a table; there is no room for a proper tree. The tree came pre-loaded with lights but I wrapped it with three thin stands of white lights. The kids hung tiny ornaments on it and called it ours. Then Lilly began to put “presents” under the tree, wads of paper she’d colored with crayons and then bound together with scotch tape. I don’t know what is beneath the paper but the packages look divine. Marni, in deference to her goddess, followed suit. Soon, the shadow of my tiny tree was sucked up by brightly colored wads of tape and paper.

The message on my machine was Lilly reminding me to bring to our Christmas Day gathering some Pokeman thing that Mamacita sent her so that Mamacita’s present could get it’s presents. Her voice was insistent and proud, sure that the Pokeman present would be thrilled by her present. Then, as certain and insistent and proud as the first part of her message, she left me my present.

Where we started.