The first time I really saw my mom drunk was in Bruges, Belgium.  I was living in the Netherlands when I was 18 and mom, dad and my younger sister Clare flew to meet me in Paris.  From there, we did a road trip north to the Netherlands.  We had been enjoying beer on the ‘terras’ (or patio) of the town square.  We met a couple honeymooning from England and spent quite a while chatting.  We went for a little wander afterwards to find dinner and mom was certain one of us was pushing her into ‘the fountain,’ which in reality was a flower garden.  And no one was pushing her.  She is a very good humoured, laughing drunk so we were quite enjoying ourselves as it felt like a new stage of our growing / evolving relationship.  All of us as adults.  Clare isn’t much younger, and of course in Europe, the drinking age is 16 (which they aren’t all too strict about).

Fast forward to last weekend and Clare and her husband and boys were visiting from the mainland, so we had a family dinner at my parent’s house with my husband and boys as well as my older sister Meghan and husband and their son and daughter. It isn’t often enough that we three girls plus parents all get together with husbands and kids, so it was a festive, Christmassy dinner.  We were all enjoying some wine and when asked how much mom had already had, my mom responded laughingly, ‘there have been 7 kids here ALL day!’

7? There were 4 grandkids there for most of the day…. She must also mean her 2 kids + 1 hubby that were day all day as well.  Then there was an incident trying to locate her glasses so she enlisted the grandchildren’s help offering a quarter to the one who finds them.  The glasses were recovered in the end, after lots of laughter and a remark by yours truly that they would probably be found near the bottles of wine.

Which is how I ended up with the quarter.  I’m kidding, I didn’t actually take it, but I was right.

This was truly the start to the festive season for us,

To my family, xo, I love you!

Xo friends, until next week 😊

Devon