Today is February 12, 2013. It’s my 104th monthiversary of marriage to Matt. Twelves are always special in this house… every 12 means we crossed another month of making marriage work! Whee!
But THIS post is about December 12, 2012, at 12:12pm, a day two months ago. In fact, Zach remembered it yesterday and was talking about what a great day we had and maybe we could do it again some time. In another century, sweetie! 🙂 Actually, we could reenact our activities from 12/12/12 12:12 anytime… I just haven’t. So we’ll see if I get inspired again. Since I haven’t even posted it here yet and it may be one of their best memories, I figured 2 months late is better than never!
I did one very simple thing with our twelves. We ate lunch in twelves at twelve o’clock. It was possibly my easiest best idea ever! (I’ve had other “best idea ever” moments, but none were as simple as this one). For 3 young children, this was a magical moment, one of the few that they may remember about me and bring up in random conversation long after the actual event took place. (Like the time I let them paint their lunch on their placemat. Or the time that I solved all of the world’s problems by making hot chocolate for my cold and terrified kids after the van accident. Or the time(s) I yell(ed) when pee-pee was(is) on the floor… they’ll remember that too. Striking genius gold is very rare, but I am convinced that a few awesome mommy moments in my children’s memories can dilute all of my disaster mommy moments… a girl can hope!)
We made “12 placemats” (it’s obviously a paper towel with a rudimentary crayon drawing on it) for each of us. I had hoped to have 12 food items with 12 pieces in each, but that’s a lot of food! We were already having several special treats (Cheetos and Ritz bits AND dessert), so I decided that 8 groups of 12, plus a 12 oz. drink, plus a cookie was plenty. We did the math and learned that we ate 109 items in total (counting each beverage ounce as an item). The kids were stuffed and thrilled and we had a blast. It wasn’t even hard! And as Zach suggested, we could eat whatever today’s date is… 2 and 12 and 13 of something. I should really attempt this again.
I never remember which meteor or comet or eclipse I saw, even though reportedly, there won’t be another one like it for the next hundred years or so. I wanted a way for the kids to remember marking an important event other than “my mom says we talked about 12/12/12 12:12 but I don’t remember.” Success!
