MyThreeDaughters

Wife and Wife’s out-of-town friend are meeting up today, kids in tow, at a campground in Maryland.
They have been planning the “menu” for several days, and I suggested a collaborative list be produced on Google Docs. To my surprise, this suggestion was met with a “Good idea!” Not to my surprise, the Google Doc-ument required a 30-minute hash-it-out phone call yesterday morning before the shopping took place.
I eavesdropped on Wife’s end of this phone call with much amusement.
“I got some good hummus, and I’ll bring that. What should we have with it?”
Ah, hummus as the main course of a meal.
“I’ll get some pita chips…Fontaine likes pita chips with it.”
Parallel to this conversation, I am thinking about my just-concluded “baseball weekend” with my old college friends. We’ve been doing it for about 10 years. The pre-planning involves a bunch of emails, most of which are jokes targeting people in the group for behavior from previous years, and no phone calls.
The main thing we line up is: Who is going to bring what kind of beer. The first year we did this, we rolled in at dinnertime from scattered points around the East Coast and we had no food at all lined up for dinner.
We have gotten much better at this, and eating well has become a key element. One guy brings a “meat pie,” an 18-inch in diameter, two-plus-inch thick pizza thing stuffed with ground beef, cheese and onions. The onions inside the meat pie stand as our only “vegetable” for the next 48 hours, other than corn on the cob. We eat hamburgers, steaks, crabs, hamburgers with crab meat on top.
Wife’s conversation goes on…and on…yogurt, yogurt smoothies, cereal…
And, yeah, I’m being completely unfair here, because she’s got to spend most of her time sweating having the right stuff for the girls, but, you know, this is my blog — and thoughtful, fair stories aren’t funny.
Finally, it seems Wife’s phone call is coming to a conclusion.
“Well, I’d better head to Trader Joe’s….Hey, I have a bottle of wine, should I bring it?”
FINALLY, booze!
Two nights, five kids, one bottle of wine?
Must be the new math.
Is Chardonnay good with hummus?