Photo: The nice wintery view out our front living room window looking over at Kathleen and Mark's house as it was snowing the other day.
Alex hasn't been too keen on showing up at any of the Christmas concerts this year, so it has left Mark and I with many a date night recently traveling to and fro from concerts on our own, sans children in the car with us, as Matt drives himself these days, which is a good thing so we don't have to do the dropping-him-off-early-for-the-call-time and then waiting-around-until-show-time bit anymore.
It's quite different being in the car, just the two of us and all. Let me preface this by saying that we were married for 14 years before said children arrived, and did quite a lot of traveling about in the car together, but now, after carting them about for 16 years, it just seems very strange to be ALONE IN THE CAR.
We were marveling at how we could discuss anything we wanted without having them say, "Let's talk about something else...." We can listen to any radio station we want without them rolling their eyes and shaking their heads. Last night, for instance, CCR came on and Mark and I both said at the same time, "Oh, yeah...CCR" and started singing Proud Mary without fear of youngsters saying, "Oh, here they go again...."
I realized that this is going way too fast...those boys are going to be gone in just a couple of years and while I will be able to do all these things at will at that point, it will also be a bit lonely motoring around about by ourselves. I am already experiencing this since Matt started driving on his own. Before that, Matt and I had a lot of time for conversations and whatnot each day just from the time we spent in the car traveling to and from practices, school, etc. Now I have to actually say, "Matt, stand still for one second and let's get caught up a bit here..."
Another aspect of this is the teasing I take from Mark about things like this: last night as we were riding along in Blue Bernice, he glanced at the dashboard and said, "Wow, your clocks are right...who changed those for you?" I replied, "Ah, well, Matt did that, and you are right, there's no way I would have gotten that done on my own." His reply, "Well, I figured it was either Matt OR I figured it just caught up with you as you had probably spent the Daylight Savings Time on winter time just adjusting the time by an hour each time you looked at the clock."
He is so onto me and my ways...that's exactly what I will be doing when Matt heads off to college. It will be like in the movie Same Time Next Year when Alda's watch isn't working correctly and instead of getting it fixed, he just adjusts the time in his mind. Yep, that will be me.
Here's a little Christmas music for you today, click
here.