Trade

A few hours after Emma got home, Adam left on a business trip.

There are still three of us around here but of course a very different dynamic.

Sunday afternoon, we took a walk.  We drove to the Provo River and walked along the trail towards the lake.  It is a lovely walk.  The river is on one side and there are houses backed up to the other side of the trail.

We walked by a house with a crazy amount of ducks in the backyard.  And one goose.  It's like the one kid who keeps says, "Duck, duck, duck duck..." while walking around the circle and never says goose.

(Annoying kid.)

I had Mark on one side of me and Emma on the other which was also lovely.

On her trip they had told a lot of jokes (and unlike me, Emma can actually remember jokes she hears) so Emma started telling us jokes. Mark--also a joke rememberer--added some jokes of his own.  Emma would spring a joke on us that would loop back around to a previous joke and Mark would almost fall off the trail laughing.

It felt magical to be walking along on a warm Sunday with yellow leaves swirling around and my children laughing on either side of me.

On the drive home, Emma, still under the influence of the teenage girl overload she'd experienced, directed us in a game of Marry, Kiss and Kill.

You name three people and the other person has to say which of the three they would marry, which they would kiss and which they would kill.

Mark kept saying he couldn't pick because he was a boy, which was a fair point.  (It's hard for 12 year old boys to play teenage girl games.) 

He did however contribute lists of people for the game.  Here are some of their combinations:

Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and Ghandi

Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump

Voldemort, Snape and Malfoy

When we returned home, we played Monopoly Deal.  I kept losing and not just losing but being annihilated.  It's mostly a game of luck so I don't know how to change the situation.

I finally decided that whoever won would have to load the dishwasher.  It didn't help.  I still lost.

And I made both kids load the dishwasher.

They deserved it.