It's that Time of Year

When I was a teenager, I was introduced to some of the “finer points” of Catholicism after we moved to Texas and lived near by grandparents for a few years. One of these points is there is a saint for everything. I don’t remember which sibling lost what, but I do remember my grandmother telling her to ask St. Anthony to help her find it.  And I remember wondering how a dead guy could possibly help anyone find anything. Guess I’ll never be Catholic.

I mean, even Emry knows some dead guy isn’t going to help her find anything. She’s only 2½, but she knows exactly who to ask for help when she needs to find something: Mama.

The other day, Ethan and Emry were playing down in the finished part of the basement where Emry’s kitchen is set up. I left them down there to go up to the second floor and put some clean clothes away. Not five minutes passed before I could hear Emry through the baby monitor.

“Mama? Where are you, Mama?”

I heard her climbing the steps, still calling my name. She stopped when she got to the first floor and I can imagine her looking around, thinking I’d be in the kitchen or living area. For then I hear her say:

“Mama, where’s Mama?”

See? If you can’t find your mama, there is only one person to ask: Mama.

It’s that time of year: searching for the right Christmas gifts, searching for that bowl you only use at Thanksgiving, searching for those ornaments you put away a year ago. Actually, I don’t have any of those problems (except maybe the Christmas gifts) as I know exactly where I put all my Thanksgiving and Christmas things: in the boxes where they belong. But there is one search every family with small children has every Christmas: the great battery search.

Maybe we’ve started a bit early, but I like to get my Christmas village out early and enjoy it for longer than three or four weeks. So, yesterday I cleaned off my desk and pulled out the container where all the village pieces are carefully wrapped and stored each year. This year I have room for only half of the pieces, so I painstakingly chose and packed the rest away. Meanwhile, I let Emry get out her Little People Christmas village, which is in the same box as the Little People Nativity set, so it all came out. A couple of the pieces light up or play music, but I had dutifully taken the batteries out before packing the toys away last January. I told Emry we’d find batteries tomorrow.

Naturally, I needed six AA batteries and only had two. So, I sat on the floor and tried to figure out what other toys in the house have batteries but Emry and Ethan don’t use much. Which brought me to a brief exercise program of running up and down stairs to find said toys, hope they used AA as I unscrewed the covers and (naturally) discovered that a few of the batteries were on their last leg (which explains why one of the toys which they thankfully only get out on rare occasions is over-the-top annoying and doesn’t seem to work right). But the batteries were found and AAs were added to my shopping list.

After all, it’s that time of year: battery companies make a killing!