I’ve been thinking a lot about family, since almost everyone is here ( Eliza, Justin and their two red-heads arrive Christmas Eve) –And what makes a family, and unlike The Royals, I know it’s not genetics, especially since we have an adopted daughter. A family is more alchemy than biology. There is some magic in the spiritual weaving of all these unique humans into a solid unit — There’s no other explanation. I mean, Mateo from Australia is our son’s partner’s son, and he and our daughter Sarah’s husband are now fast friends and have bonded over American sports. Clearly, they are related.
Turns out Christian kept all of his old baseball and basketball cards in a secret hiding place upstairs and Mateo is excited about finding the ones that Brian, who knows all about sports memorabilia says are collector’s items, and I am not in trouble for throwing them out (which I would have done had I known where they were.)
But there are also Ivy’s dimples,
which match Mateo’s brother’s. Uncle Nel’s (Stoli’s husband) and Christian have been friends since they were kids and they took the boys skateboarding today.
The backbeat in the house is a familar tone in the laughter, the whistling, the way they use their hands or make a face– it’s all so familiar– and all of the kids (and some of the adults ) fall asleep suddenly and deeply on the couch or in the car — we all also require some active play time, preferably outdoors, everyday.
We are all dog people too (even the ones that don’t have dogs like them). The smallest children are comfortable around very big dogs. Our love for animals comes from Grandma Joanne (Chip’s mother) and also my mother. Grandma Sarah loved her dogs.
I’m thinking a lot about my children’s grandmothers as we eat off their old dishes and use their old spoons for our ice cream. Grandma Sarah died years ago. Grandma Joanne is 91. I wish she could be here, but the trip from Florida to Alaska in December might as well be an Apollo moon shot. She is here though, they both are, in all of these children and at every meal. There is something eternal about families, isn’t there?
