Family Update: Part Andrew

A little too much fun was had by the dear ol' Hubby in San Antonio. He's been exhausted ever since he got back and we can't seem to get him to stay awake past the kid's bedtime. The adventures in Texas included seeing The Alamo, watching the Spurs lose to the Nuggets, eating his weight in beef brisket, serving as designated driver to all his comrades who got plastered, getting lost on the River Walk looking for his hotel and asking a prostitute for directions, (to be fair, it was really cold there and the ladies of the night were bundled up to keep their goods primed and ready. Too graphic? At any rate, he didn't know it was a hooker until she asked him if he was alone in his hotel room for the second time, and then my naive little man put the pieces together.) He also saw The Christmas Carol in IMAX 3-D, ate at some fabulous Mexican restaurants, and toured the cabinet making plant from which a good deal of what he sells every day originates. He tried to pass that last bit off as exciting and in some way cool, but I wasn't buying. He had a good trip.

When he got home, he laughed at me for getting the tree so crooked, and promised for two nights in a row that he would fix it before he went to bed. Last night he finally came through on that promise. We had to strip the tree down naked, (and in the hurried removal of ornaments, only one was broken, and I'm not saying which), and saw some branches off, only to find that the problem was not with the tree. Andrew insisted that the tree stand that I had was not the same one we had last year. I told him he was being stupid, that of course it's the same tree stand. I had pulled it out of our very own garage on Saturday, and if he didn't believe me, he could turn the thing over and see that our names were written on the bottom from that time that we were storing it in his mother's storage unit and we didn't want it to get confused with anyone else's. So he turned the thing over, and whaddaya know - our names are not on it.

My husband is not as entirely unobservant as we all might have thought.

So, my question to you is, how on Earth did we end up with someone else's crappy tree stand, and where is our nice one that is capable of holding a tree up straight? Andrew finally managed to make this mystery stand work. The tree is not at all perfectly upright, but it no longer looks like time was frozen in mid-fall. So we'll make do. And if we ever find out who has our tree stand, we're first going to ask them how they did it, and then we're going to demand the return of our good stand. Cause this one is crap. The end.

In other Andrew news, he is hording all our extra money, all forty cents of it, to finish paying for the mountain bike that he has on layaway. I'm fully expecting to wake up Christmas morning and find a package from Andrew...which I will excitedly tear wrapping from and find a note that says, "For your joy this holiday season, a donation has been made in your name to the Andrew Kestner bike fund. Merry Christmas!" But it would still beat the bag of Peanut MnM's he got me last year at 2 AM on Christmas morning. Andrew plans to have the bike by March, just in time to spend some tax return money on ridiculously expensive mountain bikes for our 8 and 6 year olds, one of which still can't ride without training wheels. Don't even get me started.

And in case anyone is interested, I have finally succeeded in getting Andrew to the gym in the mornings on most days instead of the evenings, which means that I don't feel quite so much like a single parent, and the boys now have no trouble remembering what their father looks like. I kept showing them a picture of Antonio Bandaras, but they didn't believe me.