Munchkin's Travels

I am not sure that I have thus far really portrayed accurately how cool my little sister is. Basically, people just totally love her the minute they meet her. So I am going to do some bragging:-P Can you be a proud Mom without being an actual mom? I think so…

I forgot to mention earlier that she taught me to play chess this weekend. She has been in a chess class for an hour once a week at school (um…we did NOT have chess class where I grew up…) and she wanted to practice, so she had to teach me to play. She won the first four times, but I did beat her once…I sort of got the hang of it;-)

Anywho…She went skiing one weekend last winter with three other girls. Her friend’s family has a house up North somewhere, and the Mother was away, so the Dad took the daughter and her friends skiing. I don’t think they actually skied, I think they giggled and sat by the fire all weekend. To be expected, I suppose.

The father dropped her off at the end of the weekend and I asked how she was. He said “She is welcome at our house anytime. She offered to help with the dishes, so she is a-ok in my book.” He also told me that the girls were kind of making fun of a girl in their class who is sort of fat, and Munchkin told them all that they should stop because it wasn’t nice and the girl was really nice even if she didn’t have many friends. It takes some spunk for a kid to do that near her friends.

Another time, I got a call from a mother in school. She had a daughter who was new and wasn’t fitting in…she was also kind of heavy (I think it is a different girl) and shy and was having a really hard time making any friends. One day she came home from school more excited than she had ever been because the prettiest, most popular girl (that’s Munchkin:-D) sat down with her at lunch and then the other girls did, too. I had this whole “Mean Girls” image, but I felt good that she was using her powers for good and not evil…Lol.

And then her teacher told me this story: they had a school dance last spring. Three different boys asked her if she would be their “date” (I am not sure what that means when you are 10…). She told everyone that she didn’t think they were old enough to have dates and that it would be more fun if they all just went together instead of in pairs. The teacher told me that everyone kind of followed her lead, and when she asked her about it, Munchkin said that there were 11 girls and 14 boys, so if everyone went with dates, three boys wouldn’t have anyone to go with. I thought that was pretty sharp for a little kid;-) Of course, then she told me that she didn’t like any of the three boys, even though they are the most popular ones…Lol.

So there is some bragging…hee hee. But back to the title of the post. As I have kind of mentioned, most of the kids she goes to school with come from pretty wealthy families (more accurately, all of the come from ridiculously wealthy families), but it is a small community, so everyone knows her story and my story. I think partly because of that, and partly because all the kids and the parents like her, she ends up getting invited a lot of places.

Like Europe, for instance. Last spring, I was at a basketball game, and her best friend’s Mom told me that they were going to Europe for a month on a family vacation in the summer and wanted to know if Munchkin would like to come. They have two college aged daughters and were a little worried that their youngest would be kind of bored. I said it sounded really great and asked how much it cost. She told me not to worry about it, that it wasn’t that big a deal. Which confused me a bit…I wasn’t sure about the protocol for this type of thing and had to have Smoking Hot Roommate convince me that the woman was serious (I bought her plane ticket just to make myself feel better…lol.)

I thought it over for a bit, but figured I would be nuts…maybe even cruel…to not let her see London, Paris, Bordeaux, Tuscany, Rome, Vienna and Berlin during the month of August. So of she went, temporarily adopted member of her friend’s family on a once-in-a-lifetimes cultural trip through Europe. Yes, I was a bit jealous;-) She had a great time, took tons of good pictures and the parents said that she was the easier to travel with than most adults are. They did a wine tasting in Tuscany, and I would have given anything for a drunk phone call from her, but she took a couple sips and didn’t like it…Lol. [On another note, I was hornier than a 14 year old boy all month. Being off the leash brought out the worst…er, best…in me. The Boy saved a lot of the x-rated text messages, and some of them are quite eloquent for basically being porn.]

And now she is leaving me again for about a week and a half after Christmas, this time to sail in the Caribbean with another friend’s family. Hence the need for a new bathing suit from the last post… Her friend’s grandfather has rented a yacht for the winter and the family is gonna spend 9 days with him down in the British Virgin Islands, and they invited Munchkin to go with them. So add that to the places she has been that I haven’t…Lol.

Is it normal that I let people take her away for lengthy periods of time? Probably not, and I am sure some people would find it weird and maybe not healthy. But I don’t care…as long as I trust the people she is going with, I feel like it would be unfair of me to deprive her of some of these experiences. That is what I learned the one time Papa Bear yelled at me…Lol.

OK, this post is too long. I have more, but I will put it in a separate post, and you will have to wait for that:-P