So over Thanksgiving break, Sibling 1 was complaining about how her Facebook news feed often gets overrun with updates from our other siblings.
Stupid updates.
Like “I’m so exhausted from working so hard!”, when we know this sibling is actually lying at home all day watching TV.
And I laughed at Sibling 1, saying I didn’t have that problem at all.
I assumed I had “unfollowed” their comments.
I was wrong.
They unfriended me.
I’m hurt 🙂
One to many times I recall sitting at dinner in my cute little house with my cute little husband and cute little kids for supper.
No, that’s not the part that I recall with angst.
It’s the sight we saw out our window as we ate.
The sight of little girls sneaking across the corn fields between my house and theirs.
running away
They would make a game of it. And we would play along. We would pretend not to see them. We would let them sneak up on the house. In the house. And ignore them as much as possible.
So we could say…”no, I haven’t seen them yet. Yes, I’m sure they are on there way here. Yes, we will tell them to come home.”
Knowing that the brief game was their way of coping with the crazies they were heading back to.
And knowing that soon we would have to intervene.
But for that moment…it was just a game.
10. Your family get-togethers are half-hearted or non-existent.
9. You know nothing about music or movies from your generation.
8. The most important area in your home is your kitchen (and knives are the first thing you buy to fill it).
7. You think children are overrated (can you blame us?!).
6. You claim digestive difficulties so you can head to the bathroom for “alone time”.
5. You don’t hug.
4. You think “moving-day” must be a National holiday.
3. You hear a nasty rumor about a sibling, and brush it off as mom-being-mom.
2. You hate oatmeal.
1. You secretly scheme to put your mom and estranged father in the same nursing home 🙂 (sibling #1 piping in…IT’S True. We do that!! And love it :))
Coming from a large family has it’s advantages, one of the biggest being the awesome games we were able to play growing up. I mean, how many kids can play kick ball or baseball without having to recruit the entire neighborhood?
Here’s my personal list of gaming favorites:
6. Mailman: I really have no idea why we liked this game so much. We would all just hole up in separate rooms and designate one person to carry letters back and forth between us. That’s it! It occupied us for hours at a time.
5. Sneaky-sneakiness: I don’t know if an actual game was involved in this, but we would sneak around our property all the time. We would wade through marshes, army crawl in the mud, do awesome summersaults between buildings, and anything else we thought was “sneaky”.
4. Rubber band wars: We would buy a huge bag of rubber bands, flip the couches in the living room over, and go crazy. The younger ones (yep, that meant me!) had the mission of entering no-man’s land to collect fallen missiles to bring back to our separate strong holds.
3. Snowball fights: We used to play this great hostage version where one team would hole up in a barn or other outbuilding and try to hit everyone on the other team before the hostage was freed. If the hostage was hit the game ended with both teams losing. I tried to be the hostage (snowballs hurt!).
2. Lawyer & Wedding: You’ve already heard about that here.
1. RISK: I know, this is a strange game for young children to enjoy playing, but we did! We would set the game up on the porch and spend days playing… (insert evil, dramatic video game voice from one of those shoot-em-up death games)…”global domination“. It was epic.
what the ****???
according to the phone call from the madre of the family (why I still answer, I don’t know)
someone wanted into her basement.
and tried to break a window.
they wanted in.
badly.
obviously they are desperate.
or not sane.
or…okay, those are the only 2 options.
cause most of us are leaving as fast and furious as we can.
someone else wants in???
and they are willing to use force to do so.
are there pigs flying?? there must be.
Clothes can be expensive when you are buying for 13 people. To cut costs, we usually did the whole hand-me-down thing. And a sibling sews.
But one time our mother tried her hand at it. She decided to make shorts for all the boys. She chose some really hideous large print in a scratchy fabric, got an easy (and ugly) drawstring pattern, and set to work.
A few straight sewing lines later, and several hours, she proudly displayed her final product.
The lines were actually suprisingly straight, but she’d sewn the crotch on the outside. She refused to admit it, and made one of the boys try the shorts on. Of course, he was incredibly uncomfortable.
I really don’t remember whether he was forced to keep wearing them or not. Fortunately for all of us, she decided sewing took too much time and never tried again.
Whew! Potential disaster averted!
It wasn’t until a few years ago that I realized most children don’t have code phrases they use when describing their parents, especially as teenagers. I guess it might be a little weird…
But our code phrases saved our butts more than a few times growing up.
The most useful phrase (usually shouted) : THE PASTA’S IN THE PAN!!! THE PASTA’S IN THE PAN!!!
Our mother = the pasta
Our house = the pan
Yep, whenever one of us heard our mom pulling into the driveway (it was long), we would yell this phrase out repeatedly at the top of our lungs. Once or twice our mom heard part of the code, but she had no idea what it meant. But we did; it meant stop what you are doing and go pretend you’ve been spending the last four hours being productive.
Did you ever have codes growing up? Maybe for teachers, or other people you didn’t like so much?
Phone call from Sibling #2 to Sibling #1…
“Please watch the mini me tomorrow??”
Being it was an emergency of sorts…I said yes. I’m a nice person.
I’ll let you know how being nice turns out.
In my experience…not always well.
But, they say you might not reap the rewards of being kind now…but later.
I’m thinking that was said by the person doing the asking.
Just saying.
Update:
The mini me was dropped of with 2 changes of clothes.
Why??
In case he pukes all over his current clothes.
No joke.
Sigh.
I had an “aha!” moment last night while watching TV.
Commercials were on, and right after a truly horrific political ad for a complete idiot who should never have even been allowed to graduate 1st grade, I spotted the exact replica of Sibling 10.
It was a Geico commercial.
You know, the ones where you see some random scene and then two guys are on a wierd little stage playing a banjo and guitar and saying how happy people with Geico are?
This particular commercial was a scene of a slinky going down an escalator.
Sibling 10 is the slinky.
So, I’m wondering if everyone has a sibling in there life that asks for help moving out of their apartment?
You do?
Okay fine…do you have a sibling that requires a police escort when moving out of their apartment?
Didn’t think so.
I win.
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