Christmas Eve 2014
Merry Christmas Eve to all, and to all a good night!
We have been looking forward to this night for some time. Xavier goes to bed and falls asleep, visions of sugar plums dancing in his head. Mom turns on Christmas carols to play quietly in the background. Dad dons the fake white beard held to his face by a thin elastic strap, then heads for the room we call Middle Earth, where the Christmas tree stands decorated and Xavier's one gift needing assembly stands sealed in its box.
The box has stood against the wall all week, and Xavier has played on top of it many times. It stands tall enough that he can play with the rheostat light switch, a device that fascinates him. But now that the Wee One is asleep, it's time for the box's content to make their appearance.
Ah, dreams. The substance of life, or so the round tells us. From the time he got up this morning, Xavier has been throwing up. Four times today at last count, and all but one Mom has had to change clothes too. He has been tired and cranky, and who can blame him with all his phlegm-dredging coughing and his upset stomach. Late in the afternoon Rebecca took him to the clinic. Now, he is on antibiotics three times a day.
So tired throughout the day, he actually fell asleep on Dad while in church. Wow. Rebecca says he has done that before, but I cannot remember it. Tonight, with Mom, Dad and Aunt Chellie sitting around him at the dinner table, Xavier fell to sleep in his highchair. Not even Mom's delicious Beef Burgundy (which usually he devours ravenously) could scare away the Sandman.
We woke him, changed his diaper and got him into his night clothes, fed him (a tenuous move given today's history), then got him to his crib. At last, the dream could commence! With family gathered around, the boxed item got opened, its contents sorted and laid out, the parts compared to the list printed in the assembly instructions.
The first problem besetting us was the list of tools needed: a hammer. What?! Xavier just got to sleep, and that was no easy feat this night, not after waking him from the highchair. OK, so move to the basement? Move to the patio, in freezing temperatures? Rubber mallet—O, it's still packed somewhere! Pound quietly was the solution we decided to go with.
The sparsely noted instructions were written in three languages. Lots of pictures with arrows and rotated views. No real directions of any kind, except in every panel where it warned the assembler that the wheels must be put on correctly. At least those oft-repeated instructions had three languages to get that vital point across. How to build the wheels correctly was an exercise left to the assembler. Led down a wrong trail by the arrows in the diagram, the first fubar took :20 minutes to back out, and backing out looked grim for a long time. All the while working to back out a wrongly assembled axle, those three-language warnings repeatedly taunted us. Correcting the problem left one thing certain: those back wheels aren't coming off except by means of a cutting torch or shaped explosives. That fubar worked through, we had no others the rest of the assembly.
