Being Boaz

The number of people staying at the Thomas household this holiday season necessitated some unusual sleeping arrangements. John and Mary had to sleep with Finnegan in their room, which meant a lot of interrupted sleep. The four other older kids all crammed their skinny little bodies into another room. And since the two rooms upstairs (formerly bedrooms) have been turned into studies, that left the smallest bedroom in the house to be split between three adult girls. Hmm...

The bed is a trundle bed; that took care of two people. So, at the foot of the bed, into the like two square feet of floor space that was left over once the trundle bed was rolled out, we pinched and squeezed and squished one more green pad to accommodate a third party.

And thus we slept: Christina on the main bed (because she was there first), me on the trundle (which is a little hard, but reasonably comfortable) and poor Sue relegated to the poor pinched, squeezed and squished green pad at the foot of our beds. On Christmas Eve, when the three of us found ourselves for the first time in this, shall we say, inelegant arrangement, it was hard not to draw biblical allusions. "You're just like Ruth," I tell Sue as she lays herself down on the pad at my feet. "Well, goodnight, Boaz," she says.

(I decided not to remind her that by ancient Israel's standards, she was actually proposing marriage.)