More Clucking from Our Nest

Life at the Smuckers with Everyone Home:

Jenny and Steven have been shriekier and wilder than normal, prompting Matt to pull me aside and wonder just what is going on. He has always been the big sibling and never the little one, so has no concept of the desperate desire of younger ones for attention and affirmation or their cluelessness at times of how to go about getting it appropriately, especially when the older ones come home after being gone for a while.

"You never know what you'll find in the back seat of Matt's car," says Emily. "Dishes, a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, energy drink cans, cups, and a $5000 membrane from DuPont." That last item has been a major headache for Matt. He's supposed to ship it to India to his engineer boss and has had to deal with lots of agencies and forms and permission slips, and over the holidays yet.
(Update: he just now got it safely sent off.)

I don't normally watch movies much but have been getting a good dose recently. My SIL Bonnie gave me a copy of The Christmas Shoes and we all watched it together on Christmas Eve. It is starting to be known around these parts as The Movie That Made (a certain stoic Smucker guy) Cry, and Oh. My. did I have a lapful of soaked kleenexes when it was done. Paul didn't cry, and I said, like a nagging wife, "It's ok to cry, you know. No one will think less of you." And he said, "It's ok not to cry too, you know. No one will think less of you either."

And then the girls and I sat down one evening and watched Persuasion, a lovely old-fashioned film with a truly satisfying ending including a ship sailing off into the sunset. Happy sigh.

Having Amy home has been good for us all. Emily seems livelier, Paul gets to talk school with someone of his own mind, and the rest of us are all enjoying her good sense, good stories, good humor, and all that.

Seeing the movie made me want to read Persuasion, and Amy said she has a copy upstairs, so last night I sat up late to enjoy it. I have this strange way of getting so absorbed in a book that for the next day or two I think in the writing style of the author. Like this:

Plans were made for the whole party to travel to the sea on the following morning, particularly to the town of Newport, the carriage (Ford van) being prepared for its use on the morrow, Mr. Smucker and his sons speculating about a brisk jaunt on the jetty, should the weather prove equable, and the lively Misses Smucker planning an excursion to the shops along the bayfront, the inimitable Aunt Belinda's candies chiefly, and insisting that lunch should be taken at Mo's for the entire party, although Miss Emily Smucker thought herself ill-used at the prospect, reminding Miss Smucker and her mother petulantly of how the cook at Mo's insisted on stirring gum carrageenan into the clam chowder, to which she was allergic as they all knew, but was assured that an alternative of fried shrimp would certainly be available at such an establishment, money being no object on this occasion, as the dinner would be paid for by a generous gift of fifty pounds, from a grateful parishioner, to Mr. Smucker, the curate at Brownsville Mennonite.

The mice around here are as lively and numerous as ever. I got four new traps, the kind that you set and empty by pinching the back, but they aren't worth beans. The mice nibble off the peanut butter without snapping the trap. Although one did work last night, I must say. I went out to get some milk in the spare fridge and just as I stepped into the pantry a mouse ran right in front of me and straight into a trap, which promptly snapped. The mouse started screaming and believe me I did too. Paul wondered mildly if I was trying to wake the dead, and then he quickly put the mouse out of its misery.

Ben tried making me a new kind of trap made of a 2-liter pop bottle with the top 3 inches cut off and inverted. Matt looked it over and said,

Quote of the Day:
"Well, a decent idea in concept, but it has a few engineering flaws."