Tonight’s blog will be a bit brief because I’ve been busy having an almost-perfect evening. On a side note, the abounding alliteration in the previous sentence was not intentional. Anyway, the only thing that would’ve made it a perfect evening, rather than an almost-perfect evening, would have been if my daughter had been home. She had to stay at ALC this weekend for choir practice because the Voices of Appalachia will be performing their Christmas concert Sunday evening.

So, what makes an almost-perfect evening? All my boys were here, as were Ashley, Theresa, and Tiffany. By the time Jimmy got home from work, we were in the midst of some serious multi-tasking, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

The evening began with making bacon. I had put the bacon in the oven so I wouldn’t have to tend to it quite so much. We needed bacon because I was also going to fix hamburgers, so obviously bacon cheeseburgers are the best way to go with that. Bacon in the oven worked relatively well until I got busy and forgot a pan of it and burned it black as a magic 8 ball. The boys immediately declared that pan would be Jimmy’s. They weren’t doing it to be cruel; Jimmy really does like his bacon best if it is burned. He must have loved that plate of bacon. I don’t think it could’ve been more burnt if I’d tried.

After we ate our bacon cheeseburgers, the boys wanted to play a game. Cody and Tiffany were watching TV, so the rest of us teamed up to play Trivial Pursuit. Byron and Theresa were a team, Travis and Ashley were a team, and until Jimmy came in from work, I was on my own. I must say, I was doing pretty good on my own, even with the multi-tasking. Theresa was helping Ashley study for an art test while we were playing, and I was reading English 100 research papers while we were playing.

The game finally ended when Byron gave Jimmy and me an “easy” question because he had to take Theresa home, and he knew Ashley was tired and wanted to go back to her parents’ house. Of course, with the easy question, we won, and the game ended.

After everyone left, I did put dirty dishes into the sink, but that’s the extent of the kitchen cleanup for tonight since I really needed to get my writing done. All-in-all, it was a nearly-perfect evening, even with a sink of dirty dishes sitting in there. I got to cook for my children, we played a game together, and I have just over a third of the research papers graded.

Perfect, or nearly-perfect evenings don’t have to be extravagant. sometimes simpler is better. And remember, your kids are never too old to play games with.