Picket Fence Post

The call came in at 5:41 a.m.: No school today because of the morning snowstorm.

Contrary to my constant carping about the kids being home all the time (illness, half days, vacation days, etc.) making working from home difficult, I considered this morning’s news to be a good thing.

Allow me to explain:

The Spouse had been away all weekend (went to the Patriots game in Miami while I carted The Ungratefuls around to various sporting events, to church services, to packed stores in search of snowboots after the first snowfall and to a sports-themed birthday party). His schedule over the past few weeks has been rather tight and hasn’t afforded us much of chance to go out as a family and select a Christmas tree. When he got back from his tough weekend — of watching his favorite professional football team lose, eating nice meals at swanky restaurants where no one openly farts at the table or asks for cereal instead of roasted chicken, swimming in the ocean and reveling in tropical weather — he and I examined the calendar and decided that right after school was the best time to get a tree. We’d give the tree’s branches time to warm up and fall a bit and plan to decorate it after dinner.

Now when you tell your kids that you’re going to go buy and decorate your Christmas tree, you expect an outward expression of excitement, not complaining.

The Eldest Boy, who did some of his homework when he came home from school, objected when we loaded everyone into the Picket Fence Post family vehicle to go and look for a tree. Why? He hadn’t yet completed his assignments and he, a Type-A kind of student, couldn’t stop thinking about the remaining work he had to do. It was stressing the kid out.

His lamentations continued as we commenced with the decorating of the tree after dinner, with Christmas tunes blasting in the background as I held Max the puppy to prevent him from gobbling up the ornaments. (Last week Max gnawed a few Star Wars action figures and has been teething quite a bit lately so we’re going to have to watch him closer than the Secret Service watches uninvited attendees of White House dinners to make sure that he doesn’t destroy the Christmas tree.)

At one point during the decorating, The Eldest Boy was curled up on the sofa fretting about the lateness of the hour and how he’d never get all his homework done, bellowing, “I have homework!” The kid’s 11 for God’s sake.

“It’s not like you’re going to flunk out of fifth grade because you decorated the Christmas tree with your family tonight,” I, the sometimes-Grinch, responded. We told him that he could get up early and finish up his work (he didn’t have THAT much more to complete) in the morning because family time decorating the tree came first. “You can tell your teacher that I said that.”

Thus when the call came this morning alerting us that school was canceled, I actually welcomed it so that The Eldest Boy could chill.

After breakfast this morning, the three Picket Fence Post kids charged outside in the snowstorm with Max — who has to hop through the snow like a rabbit because he’s got such short, stubby legs — and had a blast in the snow . . . until tree branches started cracking and falling to the ground. At that point, I pulled the puppy into the house and told them to stay away from the trees until the wind died down.

Now that it’s started to sleet, the kids are starting to come indoors one by one. Hopefully The Eldest Boy will just finish the damned homework so I don’t have to listen to him fret about it anymore. Until tomorrow.