Thanksgiving May Very Well Suck This Year

Yes, yes, I know; it’s really two days after Thanksgiving, but my family’s get together is today, Saturday.

Going back to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving and Christmas used to be a great joy for me. I’m the oldest of four children and none of my siblings had kids, so the day would be spent (a) with other people watching and playing with my kids, often in cool ways, with me sitting my butt on a couch (sometimes with glass of wine in hand), (b) talking with people that have semblances of real lives (those people being my siblings and their spouses) and actually know some things about the world and stuff, so it was good to get all caught up.

Now a terrible thing has happened. The last 12 months have made me an uncle three times over. All three of my siblings have had their firstborn children.

Now my wife and I will get to (1) hold a lot of babies, (2) watch my siblings worry waaaay too much about their kids (likely chopping turkey into unrecognizably small bites) (3) listen to them discuss the merits of different brands of baby clothes and videos and toys and car seats, things upon which we have all kinds of opinions, but we will have no way of expressing them without seeming like obnoxious know-it-alls, so we’ll have to just shut up, (4) watch the confused look on my children’s face as grammy and grampy aren’t devoting 100% of their time to them, (5) worst of all, I will have to entertain my own children while the tryptophan forces my limbs deeper and deeper into the couch.

To be clear: this isn’t to say that my siblings and their spouses are going about this the wrong way. I love my siblings and spouses quite a bit (and even like them too!). They’re good parents. If anything, we very well may have been more unrealistically anal about our firstborn when she was young than any of them are. But, as my wife says when she hangs out with college friends that just had their first baby: “I’m happy for them, but it’s just hard to get excited about their baby stories after a while. I’m kind of over it all.”

We’re leaving in 45 minutes and I’m not sure I’m looking forward to it this year.