My dad just called. He's going to be visiting me Sunday morning-Monday morning, and we were discussing what furniture from my childhood home he should bring for the girls. Of course now the kids are both fighting over the hutch, a nice china-and-linen-cabinet thingy that I used as my bureau when I was a teen. I have as of yet no creative way to determine who gets it. A is older, so maybe she gets it, but T seems more in need of storage. A is definitely the squeakier wheel, though, and I don't want to look like I'm rewarding her loud complainings. At the same time, at her age I used to be just as cranky as she is, so I shouldn't let her bad attitude count against her either.

Do you see how hard it is? Little things like this turn the wheels in my brain until important facts and figures that someday I'll really need get turned to ash.

Anyway, I told my dad about trying to take the girls to Six Flags this weekend, and having to either take work off Monday or do it Friday night, and he said, well, why don't we go on Sunday? I'd love to go to Six Flags! So it looks like the four of us might go. He's always been the one in our nuclear family to go on all of the big rides, while me and my mom and sister waited for him so we could do the bumper cars or the log flume. I've never been close to my dad, and throughout my adolescence we had horrible screaming and yelling and very mean fights. I really believed that I hated him. He's the typical emotionally-closed-off WASPy dad from the Northeast, prone to sudden bursts of anger directed at inanimate objects. This did not mix well with me as a teen. I did however learn how to calm down irrationally angry people (stay quiet, don't get angry yourself, talk in a normal reasoned voice, tell them it doesn't matter the bowl of pasta fell on the floor, we can make more). As little kids it was fine, our dad was the game-player in the house so he was the go-to guy for fun. But then we stopped playing games and drifted away from him and he didnt' seem to know how to communicate with us. He still has trouble and probably always will. I'm trying to be at peace with that.

So this trip to the amusement park should be interesting. We have some old snapshots of me and my sister as young kids at Great Adventure, the Six Flags park nearest our home, that dad took while we were on the swing ride. Our arms reach out like wings and our mouths are wide with delight and we're flying, all safe and worry-free.