Anticipating Night Visitors

Amy has an amazing coordination with the Easter Bunny. Apparently, if the children don't get to bed on a certain schedule, she can and will cancel his visits. This ultimatum worked like a charm for Madeleine, who went right to sleep. Because the holiday doesn't come for the Orthodox until next Sunday, the threat is pretty potent, at least for three-year-olds. Daniel believes in the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, as he explicitly stated tonight, but he still didn't get with the bedtime program. Ian eagerly pointed out that the Easter Bunny - or the Pascha Bunny, for us Orthodox basketeers - never comes to our house. He usually stops at my mother's house in Boston, instead. He did make the visit to our humble backwater last year, but Ian doesn't remember it.

Ian also pointed out that leprechauns never come to our house. He has heard many breathless reports from children in his school who, unlike Ian, are more than a quarter Irish - really culturally Irish, so to speak, even if they've never made the pilgrimage to the Motherland. They told him about all the naughty things that leprechauns have done during their clandestine visits to the children's homes - so Ian was fascinated by the category. But no - we've never actually gotten one of those nocturnal leprechaun visits in our house, as far as forensics seem to indicate.

While we were on the subject of all these charming thematic real-or-hypothetical characters, Daniel recalled the following this evening:

"Daddy, somebody on my bus named Connor got coal in his stocking."

Yes, we Irish are warped.

But to my great disappointment, it turned out that Connor also received stocking-stuffers besides the coal... Even the Irish are losing their touch.

(April 11, 2012)