I almost didn’t go to the party. It happened 40 minutes north of us and I had to take part of the afternoon off work and I have sooooo much to do in order to blast off to the Great White North in a couple days. I couldda stayed here and gotten some packing done.

I am so glad I went to the party. It was a cFam party. Not everyone was there. That wouldda been fun I guess but we number at least 50 people nowadays. This was The Lord and Lady of Linden and most of their kids and grandkids (except for the Seattle fam for hopefully obvious reasons). And our niece J and her girls. Cousins and second cousins. And us.

I had so much fun. I started out being my shy self sitting in the kitchen drinking a bit of whine and catching up with the Lord and Lady of Linden. The younger kids were bouncing off the GG in the living room. I’m uncomfortable when people try to get young children to “say hi to Auntie” or hug me or whatever. I would rather little kids approach me if they are interested. I recently (randomly) read something that rang true for teaching children that it’s okay to not want to be smothered by some evil-smelling old person that they don’t know and it turned out that J USES it with her children. “Do you want to hug, wave, or high-five?” That works for me and it would probably have worked for me as a child who sometimes encountered benign but unwanted physical attention from well-meaning folks. As most children do.

The children in this new generation of the cFam range from infants to incoming college freshmen. They are all wonderful and a few of them are spontaneous huggers. Once I gained my party feet, I especially enjoyed talking to their parents, the children of our generation. All intelligent successful adults and wonderful thoughtful parents.

I started nudging the GG a half hour or more before I wanted to leave. I knew it would take him a while to extricate himself. We got home a while back and it’s late for a School Night but I can’t help but bask a bit in the loverly Planet Ann Arborness of my own back yard, which is live with the sounds of insects and birds and with faaaarflies winking and blinking around. Life is pretty dern good tonight, knock on wood.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 25th, 2019 at 8:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.