Above: my brother's kids. Sometimes, it's difficult to really grasp the relationship I have with them, since I hardly get to see them, and their father and I barely talk. But Vicki, their mom and my brother's ex-wife, moved to Temple last year, so I get to see them a bit more now. A couple weekends back, she needed a babysitter to handle the chitluns, and I was pretty happy to comply. I picked them up in Georgetown at about 10:30am, waiting in some sub shop there. It reminded me a little of when mom and Alex would exchange Alex's kids with his ex-wife at ice cream shops and the like. I was fortunate enough to not have to go through that, since mom and dad ended up living a few miles from each other.
I wasn't entirely sure what to do with the kids for the whole day, so I brought them back to the house and turned on the X-Box, opened a box of spare Legos, and hoped for the best. AJ and Connor liked the bricks, and AJ had a rotation of movies to watch over and over. I was reminded quickly of how I would watch Daniel a lot and there was a 3-4 year stretch of my life where I could recite The Jungle Book line for line.
We ended up going to Pease Park for a bit, then over to Amy's Ice Creams to screw around. I was careful to let the kids know that the proper name of the place is not Amy's Ice Cream, but Amy's Ice Creams, lest the Austin kids beat them up and start talking about underground music at them.
Two things stuck out from the whole day, to me - one, as I watched the kids play on the table with Legos and watch their movies, I realized that apparently certain insecurities of mine have no bounds. I was struck by the thought that they didn't really like me so much as my house. Naturally, that was a dumb thing to think. Of course they like my stuff more than me, or rather, they don't really see a separation between the two. They're kids.
Second, I wondered again at how things with Ian could have gone how they did. After having a prime example of our own parents in regards of how to efficiently destroy a home and marriage, did we learn nothing? Or do things like that get passed down as examples and models for "normal" rather than cautionary tales to children. Will Ian's kids grow up thinking how things went down is the norm? What I hope is something I think every generation hopes, once they've realized how they've screwed up - please let these children be smarter than us. Good God, please.
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