It Almost Made it Worth It.

It was, at least for me, an awful weekend.  Just terrible.  One of those weekends that all parents probably have every once in a while, where you feel like there are just too many people cooped up inside in a house that is just a little bit too small filled with just a little bit too many toys.

It sort of started earlier in the week with the story of Hurricane Joaquin and the Inferiority of US Forecast Modeling.  On Wednesday afternoon the storm track was going literally right over my house. Right over my house!  Pretty much everyone but the Europeans were predicting the storm would make landfall somewhere between the Carolinas and New Jersey.  Trish bought soup and water, New Jersey fretted about a repeat of Super Storm Sandy, and Jim Cantore pinched his nipples in delight as we all wondered just where the rapidly strengthening storm would go.

Then on Thursday the storm track was a little further to the East, a little off the coast but still dangerous.  But on Friday we were all breathing a sigh of relief as the new storm track took it out to sea.  Turns out the European model was right.  I read a news story in the New York Times suggesting the model is better because the Europeans possess more computers and have better storm initial input files - I think it simply may be because they use the metric system.  As for me, the National Hurricane Center has failed me for the last time....The Government used to be good at predicting the weather, it was the one thing they could do well.  Now, I am not so sure.

Either way, the storm was threatening enough to cancel a whole raft of planned activities.  My parents cancelled a major cousins re-union in Sandbridge, and the Newport News Fall Festival was scrapped.  We lost power at work and they were going to shut it down over the weekend to fix it so coming in on the weekend to work on some stuff was impossible.

That left me with the charming prospect of sitting around with the house with the kids all weekend.

And that sounded pretty good, at first.  Two weeks ago I was away from home whitewater rafting on the Upper Gauley.  Last weekend we were in Staunton to celebrate my wife's grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary.  50 years!  Another congratulations to them, by the way.

But the weekend went awry.  The kids were kind of...bonkers.  Elizabeth wanted to build forts from furniture and blankets all weekend.  She didn't listen particularly well.  Rosalyn was her normal active self, taking naps at odd times (or no naps at all!), trying to get into all sorts of things she isn't supposed to get into.  I cooked and cleaned and then cooked again and then cleaned again and then cooked again. And then cleaned again. Our dishwasher is broken, needs replacing, and I refuse to take the easy way and go further into debt to get it replaced.  We did go to Church today, but Church....eh, it doesn't do it for me.  I go.  But it just doesn't do it for me these days.  Chelsea lost.  Virginia Tech lost.  Alles ist kaput.

By Sunday night, my nerves were frayed.

But then Elizabeth, she builds a huge pile of  stuffed animals on the living room floor, burrows into them, and then pops out of the top, her arms stretched overhead and a huge smile on her face.

"Daddy," she said.  "Do you know what that is like?"

"No," I said.

"It's like I snuck into a birthday cake, and then just before the candles were blown out I popped out of the top!"

My mouth dropped open.  "Where did you think of that?" I asked.

"It came from my brain."

I'm sure.  I don't think it's my fault.  The only two things I have watched where strippers pop out of cakes in recent years is one episode of Cheers where Diane pops out of Sam's cake and then that scene in Under Siege where the girl pops out of a cake.  How they smuggled her onto the ship I will never know.

But Cheers is something we watch at night and Under Siege....I saw it once, ages ago, before Elizabeth was born, and that was enough.  So I am not sure where she got that idea from.  It's not something that one really thinks of on their own, I would think.  I am sure there is a fairly innocent explanation....either that, or she has been learning more than I bargained for at public school.  Those liberals artsy fartsies and their Common Core.

Anyways.  It almost made the weekend worth it.  It's a funny story, one of those cute things that kids say.

But now that the kids are finally all asleep I am looking forward to the vanilla pudding I made for myself that I secretly laced with rum.

Rum.  Rhymes with yum.

Rum.