Christmas Eve: Part And-now-we-can-move-on

Having kicked Santa’s tuchus (there’s nothing like Yiddish….ok, or Klingon….to add a little chutzpah — or at least phlegm — to scorn), I was able to proceed into the vaguely more planned portion of Christmas Eve.  Next up was taking Ash to daddy’s work party.

It’s not that Steffan’s workplace necessarily holds huge entertainment value for Ash.  It’s not that there was much of a ‘party’ either.  It’s just that Ash gets a kick out of seeing daddy while he’s at work, since normally, “Daddy’s got to go to work…be good to Mommy…Mommy, say, ‘Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease!’ please, ok?  Ok!” — normally that means he doesn’t get to see daddy for a while.  Plus, Ash enjoys the attention he inevitably receives from all of daddy’s coworkers, who never fail to squee over a tiny, no-professional-pretenses-required version of their manager.  Conveniently, there is also a thrift store nearby, and among the merits of thrift stores are the facts that Ash never knows what he might discover to look at, and nobody acts too tense about him looking for it.

During our Christmas Eve visit, Ash discovered gag glasses.  That meant that after daddy and all his coworkers thought they’d used up their excuses to interrupt work to simply grin at Ash and I, we could surprise them.  It also meant that my sensory boy was eager to, as I saw it, practice the REAL glasses-wearing he is almost certain to end up needing to do.  That was so worth a dollar a pair.  Oh yes, there were two pairs.  The traditional variety with empty, thick black frames, a large pink plastic nose, and small tufts of black eyebrow and mustache attached which give me flashbacks of the Marx brothers that I’m supposed to be too young for….those, he referred to as, “The Daddy Glasses.”  The other pair, which featured circular black frames with coke-bottle lenses, as well as a red clown nose, Ash named, “The Mommy Glasses.”  Let’s just all play nice and assume that the only rationale behind all this was that he realizes if anyone is going to have extra tufts of hair coming out of their face, it is likely to be a daddy.

Let it be known that if you want to extend your silly sensory child’s practice run with gag glasses, you also want to grab a hand mirror.  Worked like a charm.  After all, everyone else giggling at him, and him giggling at himself, combined exponentially when it came to the time passed doing so.

Large glasses and a giant schnozz.  Suddenly I’m 3 again, and looking up at a table surrounded by my Jewish great-uncles.  Except, it’s cuter.  Far cuter.  That, and, truth be told,  they all would’ve plucked themselves bald before having a tiny, rectangular mustache.

Ash doesn’t know what he’s going to look like in this version of the gag-glasses get-up, yet, but he knows it’s going to be funny!

Some day, my son might ask me to take him seriously.  This was not the day.

If one pair of gag-glasses makes for a silly disguise, then the only logical thing to do is to put on two pairs of gag-glasses.  Now we’ll just see who gets told, “Oh my God, you look just like your daddy!” HA!

These photos alone make me forever grateful for camera phones.  The only thing I didn’t catch at all was when he had on both pairs of glasses and the clown nose over the big pink nose, and that’s just because his tiny nose barely kept on one layer, let alone three.  Well actually, I also regrettably failed to capture what really would’ve needed video to memorialize properly anyway, which was what happened when Steffan’s work-distracted brain caught up with his eyes, and an innocent, “Hi, Daddy!” was followed by him wheezing for breath after nearly falling down laughing, something he would’ve recovered from a tad faster if the associate who ran over to see if he was ok hadn’t knocked him back down, tipping over with surprise hilarity, herself.

FA-LA-LA-LA-LAAAAAA LA-LA-LA-LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

After that, I might have been content to call it a night, but there was still cookie-baking for Santa (the 3rd aimed-for “First” for this Christmas) to get through…