Fortune Cookies
Last night after eating sweet and sour chicken and edamame, Charlie, Jerry and I opened our fortune cookies. Mine said:

The Happiest Circumstances
Are Close to Home

Charlie broke his open and anxiously handed it to me for reading.

You Are Entering A Time
Of Great Promise
And Overdue Rewards.

He frowned. No, no. The home one. Read the home one. I read it again.

The Happiest Circumstances
Are Close to Home

Yes, that one. Close to, to Home.

It made me think about how much Charlie loves being at home. There have been days this winter that we have been stuck inside for four days straight. Then the roads will clear a little, Jerry will come home from work, and I will announce that I am going to Safeway or the mall or some other horribly boring place, and that I won’t be back for a long long time, because I need to see walls that I haven’t already been staring at for what seems like months. And I’ll invite Charlie to come, and he will decline, stating that he wants to stay home.

Home... The place with piles of laundry in the hallway at all times, that smells like dirty diapers more often than it should, that always has piles of papers on the stairs waiting to be carried upstairs.

But for Charlie, home is the place associated with familiarity. The thing which is often boring to an adult is most comforting to a toddler. And I'm glad that in spite of my failure to become domestic in any way, he loves his home.