Well, the last time I did a Christmas festival here was 2014, and that’s just ridiculous! You’re nine (Oliver) and six, almost seven, Georgia, and you remain the best kids that we ever could have dreamed of. So one day, when you've forgiven your stodgy parents for refusing to buy you phones or iPods or other screen-y things this Christmas, you will perhaps look at this blog and see love falling all over the place, making its way from my fingertips to this black keyboard, and maybe you can imagine me late at night feeling exhausted but also replaying all the many moments of the day when you made me laugh, when you asked me in a movie theatre if you could sit on my lap (Georgia) when I had to plead with you (Oliver) to come back from outside to kiss me before you headed into your friend’s car to go to a hockey tournament an hour away (so far!), which you did, and then you hugged me for good measure and for many perfect seconds before telling me not to worry about the drive on the stupid stretch of highway, which of course I did worry about.
Today you will score the first goal in your team’s tournament, O, and it will be your first goal of the season. Your dad will send me a picture of your ruddy, beautiful face with your very silly friend beside you, and you will be wearing a construction hat because you earned the hardest working player honour. And I will look at the picture on my phone and melt, and send a whole bunch of emojis for you: hands clapping, thumbs up, hearts in every formation, lightning bolts, and more.
And I will miss being there, but I will also rush to pick you up, Georgia, from aftercare so we can go home to wear our matching “diamond” necklaces to a movie at the cinema with your great friends Annabelle and Josh, and I will catch up with their beautiful mom, Marie-Claire, for too short a time (it always is with you kids!). It will be a donkey-centred movie about Jesus’s birth, and that’s my kind of religion.
By the time we get home, it will be bedtime, and we both know that you will sleep with me because the boys are away. First we’ll look in on your bedroom, because we decorated with magic lights there earlier, then we’ll race to the bed and snuggle until you fall asleep. Before I join you, I’ll run down to the main floor and get that blasted Elf on the Shelf and pop him in your covers in your stead. I get you, beside me all night.
Happy first day of Christmas, gorgeous kids. I love you more than every grain of sand, every gust of wind and every wave in the sea.
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