TNT Weekend with Isabelle
This weekend I had just finished baking some orange & cranberry mini-muffins in a fit of domesticity when my sister texted me. I was also just about to pick up a sock, which is a trigger behavior that will soon find me with an old toothbrush scrubbing behind the toilet, because I Can Never Leave Well Enough Alone.
Anyway, my sister was texting to see if my niece Isabelle and their dog could come over for the weekend while she and her husband are off gallivanting around with their other offspring, Lauren. “Sure,” I texted back. “Always down for some Tante-Niece-Time" (TnT™).
So as I sit here with a bloody nose, let me tell you about my weekend.
Isabelle (because my little chubby toddler niece is now a 16yo driver!!) literally rolled up mid-morning and promptly ate most of my muffins. That’s how I know God is on his throne…little things like this, where I make something she likes 30 minutes before I know she’s coming over. It makes me so happy.
When she got here, Izzy deposited herself on the couch and began teenage-ing, which we all know is scrolling IG and whatever other apps the kids are using these days.
I continued cleaning, listening to what my brother calls my “Jesus music,” and I don’t think I heard too many sighs from the couch. Isabelle is baptized, so that’s as it should be.
For lunch, I got a hankering for sushi, and if there is one thing my nieces love, it’s James Taylor (thanks to Tante) and if there’s a second thing my nieces love, it’s a good sushi roll. So I didn’t have to sell Izzy on it too hard. Twenty minutes later, we’re ensconced in a nice booth at my favorite sushi place, Kotta Sushi Lounge and trying to figure out how to use the inevitable chopsticks that come with this cuisine.
I can’t. I never have been able to. I just do not have the finger-thumb (dum-ditty-dum-dum – name that children's book) coordination it takes to operate chopsticks, so I dug in my purse for my “training wheels” and attached them.
Izzy has this “look” that gathers on her face when she’s trying to:
1. Fearfully determine just how embarrassing Tante is going to be, and
2. Decide just how mortified she’s going to be because Tante is being ridiculous.
It inches across her face like a sunrise gathers on the horizon: hesitation, trepidation, slight desperation and then, like the sun bursting over the edge of the earth, outright teenage eye-rolling. I LOVE IT. She took my chopstick shortcut with good grace, sitting there like she wasn’t humiliated to be eating sushi with a 45-year-old toddler. Of course, I cackled the whole meal.
After that, we went to Hell, a.k.a. the mall to exchange something, and then on to Hobby Lobby, a.k.a. God’s home decorator. After a stop at the grocery store, we went home, and I made her watch Indian Wells (i.e. tennis) for 2 hours.
And that, my friends, is how I got a bloody nose. Izzy couldn’t take any more.
Just kidding. There I was, making a delicious stroganoff, and while seasoning my sauce, snorted a hair too much Ground White Pepper and paid the price. I got to see another one of Izzy's Looks. Totally worth it.
