I owe you this much

Here they are, the three Spencer sisters, invading my nephew's playroom.  August Camillo is not yet two, and my three basically took over his joint for Easter.  There was no golden crown rising, no poetry lesson, no moment of evanescent insight or beauty.  Nope, not this Easter.  There was too much chocolate, a fierce case of the "gimmees" about the too much chocolate, and a lot of grabbing to boot.

The four year old did a face plant, the second in two weeks.  A whole new shiner to explain to the pre-school teachers.  When she wasn't crying, she was lobbing stuffed animals over the side of the loft, aimed directly at my brother's mother-in-law's head.  I'm not sure what you call the mother-in-law of your brother--she is something like a mother-in-law once removed to me or something along those lines. But no matter, what I can call her is kind.  "Oh, I'm fine," she kept saying with a smile on her face as the next squirrel bomb hit her on the head.

And then there was this, Eloise's knock, knock joke to end all knock, knock jokes:

Knock Knock.

Who's there?

Hammer.

Hammer who?

Hammer his penis.

Yep, that happened on Easter.

And then I promptly fell asleep on the couch.  I only woke up because the phone in my pocket was ringing.  It was my Aunt Virginia calling from New York, she'd been trying to get in touch with someone, anyone to exchange Happy Easters, but no one else had their phone on them that afternoon.  "At least there's someone there today who's taking responsibility," she said.  "No one else is answering their phone."

Virginia, thank you for giving me the benefit of the doubt.  It was undeserved.

I tell you all this, because, I just want you to know how it really is, and how I really am--falling asleep on the couch.  

I want you to have the whole picture, because the truth is, I see unspeakable beauty everywhere, but you'll never believe me, if you don't know whole picture--how I fall asleep on the couch, how I swear like a sailor, how my kids bicker fiercely,  how one lied to me, and how the first place my mind went was to pin it on her friend--just like that, so swift, "my kid would never do that," so wrong-headed.  I missed an important meeting, I dropped off my kid and someone else's at art class without waiting to see if they walked through the door.  They didn't.  The teacher never showed and I left them there for two hours unattended in the middle of town.  I was responsible for all that.  And that was just this weekend.

You see what I'm getting at? I just want to make sure you get the whole of it.  The golden crown rising was no fiction.