Make a Joyful Noise

Just a brief update: Eli had surgery on Friday to correct an inguinal hernia (two of them, as it happened) that developed in response to the increased pressure in her abdominal area produced by the fluid drained by her shunt. The operation went very well. Eli returned home Friday afternoon and was soon bouncing off the walls again—or at least bouncing on, and very nearly falling off, our bed. Julia was so worried about her little sister that she wouldn’t even go to Joy School. Eli for her part called out for her big sister even in the anesthesia-induced semi-coma of her post-operational napping. They had a sweet reunion in the back seat of the Bull when Justin and Julia picked up Lia and Eli to take them home.

Other than this it has been a pretty typical week, though typicality has rarely in the history of this illustrious blog been an obstacle to prolixity. Justin took two of his finals; his final final awaits him between now and Wednesday (it’s a 24-hour take-home). He also started taking a French for reading class (the one Lia took a year ago) at the College. Lia and the girls cheered wildly for Romney’s victories in Michigan and Nevada, and Eli wondered allowed on Saturday night why we didn’t just let South Carolina go in 1860 (“or in 1829 for the matter of that,” Julia chimed in). As the weekend progressed we received excited phone calls at half-hour intervals from Lia’s family, who bubbled with gossipy enthusiasm over the visit to Dixie of the family’s fourth daughter’s latest suitor. Justin took this all in with disinterested bemusement—that is until Lia informed him that nuptials in the family mean trips to Utah and tuxedoes in St. George, at which point he resolved either to poison the relationship or to convince the sister in question that the Boston Temple is, of all places on the globe, the finest for a wedding.

Julia’s and Eli’s collective repertoire continues to expand. This week they learned, “I Won’t Say I’m in Love” from Hercules, that rollicking pastiche of popular mythology and popular—well, popular everything else. Try as we might, we can’t quite break Julia of a chronic case of broken record syndrome. She focuses in on a single phrase of a song and repeats it again and again and again—ad infinitum, ad nauseam, ad vomitum, ad insanium (in this case it was “If there’s a prize for rotten judgment, I guess I’ve already won that”—repeated seven thousand three-hundred eighty-four times). Eli does the same thing, but in such a charming, staccatoed monotone and with such earnest sincerity that it’s harder to be annoyed. Harder, but by no means impossible. Thankfully, the girls have of late taken an interest in Dora, a development that has all the advantages of promoting cultural pluralism and, if but for a few brief sweet moments, displacing the damnable dames of Disney who have robbed us of the peace, tranquility, and intellectual high spirits of our once-happy home. But hold: the Princess Purge draweth nigh, and we need say no more until that joyous hour.

A couple weeks ago Lia, ever the dealmonger, bought a 4-DVD “Family Pack” with 20 very old movies spanning in date from the 30s to the 60s. It cost eleven cents. The writer, together with his family, sat through one of the twenty films earlier today and it was clear from the outset and grew clearer as the show trudged on that Lia got ripped off.

And so might you complain, dear Reader, if you had to pay as much for the perusal of this blog. Thankfully, the blogosphere is as free as the air we breathe, though perhaps less to be prized than the slumber it so invariably induces.