Pens are for chewing

It’s that time of the semester: we all had work to do. Sunday evening, Beautiful Smart Wonderful Daughter and Boy in Black took the kitchen table, their textbooks and papers spread out, cell phones and laptops lying in wait. With-a-Why stayed on the couch: Shaggy Hair Boy took his usual spot at the piano. I took a break from my reading to cut up a bunch of vegetables and get them simmering for soup.

The cats were less sedentary than the humans: they kept jumping up to claim laps, sit down on papers, or chew on pens. Trouble, our grey male cat, kept chewing on my daughter’s pen even as she was trying to write. My husband, traveling on the west coast, kept sending us all text messages; I'm not sure he realized that we were all in the same room. "Did you get the photo of the harbor seals?" my daughter asked as she glanced at her phone.

"Yep," Boy in Black said without even looking up from his quantum mechanics book. "Next it'll be a text about missing you. Dad always gets nostalgic when he's out of town."

It was about midnight when Boy in Black decided we needed a break. "Family movie time," he announced.

"At midnight?" I asked. "That's ridiculous. I'm tired. We all have to be awake in the morning."

But of course, I can never resist the invitation to hang out with my kids. We piled onto the couch, all five of us, and he started the movie on his laptop — a quirky Canadian film about a high school kid who thinks he's the reincarnation of a famous Bolshevik revolutionary.

"You're going to be tired at school tomorrow," I said to With-a-Why, who was snuggled against me. "I'm such a bad parent."

"Yep," he agreed. And then we watched the movie.