After six days in the Heartland, the boys are back in town. And the first day back after a long car trip home with Mama is always a trying one, because they cannot help but go COMPLETELY BATSHIT CRAZY. Not only have they been cooped up in a midsize backseat for eight hours, they've slept in that backseat for hours at a time. So they're antsy and addled by car snacks and not even a little bit tired. And after you feed them dinner, that modest little uptick in blood sugar is like a Mento sliding into a gallon of Coke. Except the sugarspew keeps flying everywhere and jumping on the couch and light-sabering the Christmas tree and Greco-Roman wrestling and swinging from the bunkbeds long past their bedtime, until Daddy has to announce that the first boy to fall asleep gets an extra slice of bacon in the morning.
All I can tell you is that on the first day after the blizzard, the sledding conditions were terrible. The snow was powdery and being blown everywhere by 40mph winds. Today, however, the sun was warm enough to melt the drifts into a sludge, and right now that sludge is freezing back into a solid sheet of ice. And tomorrow, I will sled these kids into oblivion. They will sled and hike and sled and hike and sled some more and feel an onslaught of Awesome Endorphins that will make their pituitaries and hypothalami merengue off to Rio and back. And then, they will sleep the sleep of kings.
It's good to be Dad again.
