Fake Christmas Morning

The kids and I went to a photo shoot today related to Grace's job. It's complicated how so I won't explain. The theme was Christmas morning. The place was actually a woman's house who happens to live on campus at Middlesex boarding school. It was a lot like Groton. In fact I heard that is on purpose because the founder of the school was a Groton Alumn or some such thing. I only mildly care. Anyway, they have a circle, and at one point me and Jonah ran around it. Unlike Groton there is the option of crossing through the center of it because they actually paved a path there. I was surprised that I care about something like this.... but I like Groton's layout better. In fact I suddenly realized that one of the reasons why I chose to go to Groton even though they didn't offer Mandarin (now they do), or have a strong music program (now they do), or various other things that I should have cared about....the reason why I chose Groton because of the layout of the campus. And Ironically, it was probably my Chinese Feng Shui thinking part of me that would choose a school for that reason.
Jonah and I went into the Chapel because I realized that Jonah has never been in a chapel before. It would be fun to go in as a sort of exotic entrance into somebody else's religion, instead of something that is more or less thrust upon you. Someone was practicing the piano in there. We sat and listened for a while. Jonah had had enough. Jonah will not be going to any religious/boarding schools I can tell you that right now. Noah might be able to just block out or ignore or utterly fail to notice any feelings of discomfort or not belonging... so he might still go... not sure yet.
The kids did pretty well on their fake Christmas morning. It also turned out that the Head of school at Middlesex worked at Groton when I went there. I actually did remember her and remembered that she was really nice to me. It was weird to go into a sort of alternate universe, where I was in a school like my highschool, only different, with my kids. It's like a couple of weird dreams I've had, only it was reality. The fact that so early in the morning there is a mist hanging over the river and the surrounding area made the environment poetic. What I mean is, if I chose to write about this in a waspy prose form I could imagine a class around a Harkness table talking about how the mist signified stream of consciousness and the poetic staring into the shimmering water and leaves shifting over them with my child in my arms and someone else's child next to me asking questions represented... well stuff that it didn't necessarily represent.... and that perhaps the entire morning had taken place in my mind, and not reality. In fact on the way there Grace and I had been talking about religious beliefs and thought and souls.
In any event, that conversation happened while the kids were screaming and the radio was blasting, there was a bunch of fog during rush hour, and I got a weird deja vu being on a boarding school campus with my kids when I didn't know I was going to be.