An Epiphany

This weekend, I had An Epiphany. It was not a sudden realisation that I'm not a completely crap mother, and that LittleBear is growing up just fine despite all my deficiencies. I haven't had a change of personality. No. It was not that kind of epiphany, it was An Epiphany, the baptism of Jesus, the visit of the Magi, the first Sunday of the New Year.

After my bleatings before Christmas about my dearth of traditions, and sorrow about not knowing how to keep hold of the joy of childhood Christmases when everything from my childhood has evaporated, my friend Piglet made an inspired suggestion. She suggested that we start a new tradition. Because all traditions have to start somewhere, and there's no reason we shouldn't just decide to start one.

So we did.

And our new tradition is to get together on Epiphany Sunday every year, eat yummy food and play games.

So we did.

The two little Piglets and LittleBear played together more peacefully and peaceably than I think I have ever known, vanishing upstairs together and adorning LittleBear's bedroom door with this sign*:

GirlPiglet's declaration of independence

The adults remained downstairs, crawling around on the living room floor, attempting to complete a nightmarishly difficult jigsaw that LittleBear had chosen for BigBear for Christmas. Every now and then we turned on LittleBear's monitor to check the children weren't strangling each other, then turned it off again as they were a bit noisy (though unstrangled).

The jigsaw itself was a scene of sea creatures, which would have been quite doable, with only the minor challenge of having quite a lot of relatively uniform blue in it. BUT this was no ordinary jigsaw, it was a 3D lenticular jigsaw, so the image on every piece shifted and changed as you tilted it, as did the completed jigsaw as you moved your head. The result was a vague sense of sea-sickness while attempting to do the damn thing, coupled with a complete inability to judge the colour or picture on any piece. Nothing was what you thought it was.

Quite a fun non-3D jigsaw

It is hard to describe the yawning chasm that exists between that static, calm, unmoving, 2D, clear image and the brain-bendingly impossible image we were actually confronted with. We have decided to keep it until LittleBear is 43 and then give it back to him in revenge.

The rest of the day was less stressful, and involved an extremely large roast dinner, LittleBear making his tooth bleed by eating a Yorkshire pudding**, me inadvertently feeding the children a chocolate pudding containing brandy and chocolate liqueur, a mid-afternoon meal that consisted almost entirely of cheese, and several board games.

We have decided that our new tradition is a good one, and will be allowed to continue. The Piglet children have decided we need to have a new jigsaw each year for the day (though I may put my foot down at another lenticular one). LittleBear has decided we now need to own a copy of Carcassonne. I have decided that our children are now old enough to be relatively civilised, and that I should have friends round for Sunday lunch more often, and not just save it for Epiphany.

* BigBear is chanting "Fake News" at me as I post this picture, so I shall confess that it has been mocked up, using the original sign afixed to the living room door. I couldn't be bothered to go upstairs and take a photo of it on the correct door. 

** Despite my taking my life in my hands and abandoning my grandmother's Yorkshire pudding recipe, this was not because of any concrete-like consistency to my pud'ns but because said tooth was on the brink of falling out. Honest.