I will do such things . . .

A new year is upon us and with it the almost impossible task of improving upon our performance of last year in carrying forth the chronicle of this immortal blog. New year’s resolutions prove so difficult for the perfect, or nearly so. Still, drawing inspiration from the hopeful oxymoron of the Constitution’s preamble (“a more perfect union”?), we set forth upon a new year of blogging, sanguine that the fourth year of Collings Family Adventures, like the fourth year of Lincoln’s presidency, will be its finest. It should be noted, however, that we labor under new disadvantages. Our increasingly senior senior editor turned twenty-seven last week—not an epochal event in the lives of most mortals but noteworthy all the same for the transition it signals from one’s “mid-20s” to one’s “late-20s.” The attendant decline in personal hipness was almost immediate, and there is bound to be some decline—oppose it though we shall—in the far-famed verve and vigor of our blogoprose style. But we’ll do our best. We begin (where else?) with the latest installment of our Illustrious Review.

Monday (12.29.2008): It was an unseasonably warm and sunny day, so Lia saw fit to get the girls out of doors. To that end, we piled into the Grey Ghost (i.e. the van) en masse—Justin, Lia, Julia, Eli, Katharine, Grandpa Bruce, and Grandma Patti—for a trip up Route 10 to what the girls affectionately call “the Peacock Park.” The Peacock Park (TPP) is a rural escape where peacocks, sheep, and Shetland ponies amble about in splendid confinement, and where children run wild on an open field and look longingly over a frozen pond. We enjoyed ourselves. Justin and Julia tried at length but finally in vain to find a rock or branch large enough to crash through the pond’s ice after a Herculean heave. Perhaps the heaves were inadequately Herculean. In any case the sticks and stones all bounced and glided merrily across the ice. When our revels at TPP were ended, we retraced our steps on Route 10 to Wentworth’s where Justin’s parents were introduced to the home-made glories of that institution’s ice cream. In the afternoon Justin had an appointment at school and Lia and Grandma Patti (principally the latter) had an appointment with various commercial establishments. Julia and Katharine went along for the shopping fun; Eli wisely took a nap. Grandpa Bruce kept a vigil over the sleeping Eli, which meant reading one or two Lloyd Alexander novels in a single sitting (he read the whole of the Prydain Chronicles during their brief visit; it took us many months to read them to the girls). For dinner we pulled out all the stops and abandoned ourselves to untrammeled luxury. We ate hot dogs.

Tuesday (12.30.2008): Grandpa and Grandma were a little late in coming to our apartment this morning, but there was a ready explanation for this departure from routine. Grandpa Bruce, an irrepressible rock hound, had gone to visit a local gem store. In vain; the place was closed. Indeed, in a distressing emblem of the depths of our current recession its successor appeared closed too. But however that was we still had time for an eminently educational pre-prandial visit to the Peabody Museum. In the presence of so many dinosaur bones, Justin relived memories of his boyhood days as a real connoisseur of the terrible lizards, a bona fide dinosaur nut. He thought of the magnificent zeal with which he devoured dinosaur books as a child; reflected ruefully how quickly and completely such intrepid curiosity was crushed by the omnivorous alternatives of sports and video games; he considered intellectual roads not taken. Still, he cheerfully concluded, he did manage to grow into considerable of a nerd—if no scientist.

Everyone enjoyed the museum. Julia liked the Brontosaurus best of all; Eli the Dodo.
Wednesday (12.31.2008): Justin’s birthday is as universally celebrated as this blog is universally read. Indeed, an old friend wrote to assure him that, honoring venerable tradition, he and his kin had stayed up until midnight—so as not to miss out on a single potentially waking minute of Justin’s birthday—and had made various goals about how they could be more “Justin-ish” during the twelve months that would inevitably, if lamentably, intervene before Justin’s next birthday. All the world does the same, which somewhat embarrasses our bashful senior editor. On this particular birthday, the climatic deities hailed the day with a raging blizzard—a howling Nor-Easter that resulted in the woeful cancellation of a planned duck-pin bowling excursion during which Justin was to have donned a “Birthday Prince” head piece that seems a fusion of a jester’s crown and a medium-sized gourd (see pictures). In any case, Julia ensured that he wore the hat for most of the day. Cancelled bowling notwithstanding, Justin was treated like a king. His mom showered him with gifts—mostly BYU athletic gear as part of a continuing effort to condole with Justin on the death of his own athletic dreams more than a decade ago—and his wife stuffed him with meals (scrambled eggs and mushrooms for breakfast; pasta al forno for dinner; copiously iced cake thereafter). In the afternoon Grandma and the older girls were in the mood for some serious high culture; they watched Mary Poppins and practiced arching their eyebrows.

Thursday (1.1.2008): Grandma and Grandpa’s visit came to an end today; we were very sad to see them go. As Justin piled into the van with the two bigger girls to take his parents back to their hotel to catch a shuttle to JFK, a very resistant Eli shrieked in agony that something was “Ouchie! Ouchie!” Justin, exasperated, asked her where it hurt. As if on cue from the Hallmark Corporation, Eli put her hand over her heart and wailed, “Ouchie that Grandma and Grandpa are leaving!” Before they left we spent a rich morning, singing several primary hymns together before Justin and his dad spent an hour swapping mission stories. As Justin drove home with Julia and Eli after dropping them off, Julia sensed with a child’s perceptiveness (though perhaps it was the tears that gave it away) that her father was sad. “Daddy,” she asked, “are you sad that your parents are going back to Utah?” After a paternal answer in the affirmative Julia added, “I bet you really love your mom and dad.” He does. We are grateful they could come.

Friday (1.2.2008): Lia took Eli to the optometrist this morning to fix the latter’s glasses—an almost monthly necessity—then on a series of errands and necessary purchases. Eli was richly arrayed and wore pigtail braids for the occasion. Justin held down the fort with Julia and Katharine. The rest of the day was pretty quiet. Lia finished reading the John Adams-Benjamin Rush correspondence in the evening with renewed appreciation of why Adams is Justin’s favorite founder.

Saturday (1.3.2008): Justin did some heroic house-cleaning this morning, a performance crowned by full-scale vacuuming and a deep clean of the bathroom, toilet and tub included. He then swept gallantly off to the library where he finished David Potter’s, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, a political history of the prequels to the Civil War. In his absence, Lia got to thinking about our basement storage unit—specifically about that unit’s appalling lack of cinder-block shelves. Never able long to behold a windmill without at length bending her lance against it, Lia was soon, all three girls in tow, scouring the corridors of the Home Depot in search of the coveted cinder blocks. These last were, at length, secured—all six of them, weighing thirty pounds each—and purchased at a stunning bargain price. What kind of a figure they must have cut—Lia pushing an oversized cart, overloaded with a hundred kilograms of cinder blocks, and her vision totally blocked by the presence of three eager children and a car seat—the reader, and the senior editor for that matter, can only smilingly imagine. When Justin gently suggested that this may not have been the best of activities for a woman recently delivered of her third child to engage in, Lia retorted, unanswerably, that she had gotten a great deal. The price of a great deal, Justin had reason to remind her, is usually undesired consumption. “Ah,” she answered, “like when people read your blog posts for free.”