Sticks and Stones

I quit work early today and have been making pies since 1 pm so as to avoid kitchen chaos tomorrow: 

• Four pumpkin pies. 
• Three fireball whiskey pumpkin pies (as an experiment)
• Four Tollhouse Pies

Grant and I got the food shopping done yesterday, which is a miracle in and of itself, especially because there was very little of our normal bickering. Though it did take a long time just to MAKE the list because Grant kept interrupting me when I was trying to write something down by saying something HE wanted written down, which then made me keep forgetting what I was about to write and then we would both stare at each other with these blank looks: a clash of things forgotten. Somewhere up in the universe are little floating cartoon thought bubbles with works like “butter” and “charcoal” colliding into each other.   

There are a lot of things to remember for our holiday food traditions and we didn’t want a repeat of the “Cool Whip Incident of 2018”. 

Thanksgiving is my most favorite holiday of the entire year. Food, Family, Football and the traditional Thanksgiving Day FIGHT where at least one of us loses their cool every year because they are not able to overcome someone else’s snarky words.

Whoever wrote the poem…

Sticks and stones may break my bones

But works can never hurt me. 

…has not met any west coast Siwinskis. Sticks and stones are soothing compared to the trash talk that happens in our household, especially during the holidays. It usually involves a board game or the mad rush to get the food prepared and unburned but fully cooked in perfect synchronicity (which has happened maybe 5 out of 28 times.) 

One of the boys has a video from a few years ago when our youngest Mitchel blew his cool and spewed a very gruesome but quite epic threat upon his gloating oldest brother Duncan who was I’m sure taunting him relentlessly with words “that can hurt you” during a game of Monopoly. To tell you exactly what he said would mark me publically for potential Bad Mother Prison because it’s always the mother’s fault when the child does or says bad things. 

But one thing is for certain about these Siwinskis of mine: they are not fragile people who are easily offended. Most of the world’s nonsense (and there is a lot of it) rolls off them like water on a duck because their skin has grown thick from rude word calluses. Unless of course the words are from one of their own. Those still sting.

I just hope it’s not me on video this year. I’m generally pretty joyful (wine) on Thanksgiving, unless of course SOMEONE doesn’t give me enough warning about when the turkey will be done, which can result in lumpy mashed potatoes. Like the Tragic Thanksgiving of 2017.