A day with my family

Hi readers! I know you have missed me, heaps. I was making my family a priority while hanging out with them over the holiday weekend. Now at 12:30am on a Wednesday morning (eeks! SO early!) I am making you a priority over sleep. Or is it because I just watched the movie The Next 3 Days and am too wound up to properly konk out?

Anyway, for kicks, I thought I would share some of the activities of a holiday Monday at home.

Since the Big Kids watched a movie on Sunday night and we finally had no place to go in the morning (after school/work and then graduation and then church) we got to sleep in. Sleeping till after 9 is such a happy healing much-needed restoration of all those little tired-out cells in your body! Breakfast after 10... an extra cup of coffee that my thoughtful mother left for me! Then it was time to go play another round of our Age of Empires multi-player game with my three youngest brothers up in the computer lab. We had started the game the day before, and now that I was slightly more familiar with it, we got into attack mode... it was rather stressful for everyone, judging by my  brothers' reactions. This is why I don't like to play computer games generally speaking, they are too stressful. Why I usually stick with Capture the Flag. 

After that I thought I would get a little bit of work done. But that was useless because my laptop browser refused to pull anything up for several hours. Seeing that it was bent on still sleeping in, I went on to the next thing. What was the next thing? This was two days ago and my memory is already failing me. I think we goofed off until just before lunch when I ran downstairs and went on the treadmill for a bit because I was going nuts not moving enough.  It was rainy you see, and we were cooped indoors instead of being outside playing racketball or Capture the Flag or other things that could properly exhaust our lungs.

After lunch it was back to the computers for more game time! This time my youngest brother Trevor and I had a "race" in Commander Keen. I was internally giggling over this the whole time because I remember Trevor exceeding my Keen skills back when he was about 4, which was already 7 years ago. But I wanted to try my hand again at C Keen for old times' sake. I think I made it to the 4th level in the 45 minutes we had... Trevor was probably already at least on level 10. It's hard not to jump at the stomping cactus enemies! Stunning the big one with 2 back-to-back shots was extremely stressful but I somehow made it. Trevor showed me the secret of saving your game just before you get to a tough spot so you can save your lives and retry as often as you need.... Genius!!

I had posted on Facebook that I was having this race with Trevor when we started. At the end of our time I saw that my sister Kendra who was (as far as I knew) still in Des Moines, commented on my wall to see how the race was going. I found that odd. Then found my mom had announced on Facebook that Kendra was here. Yikes!! Time to run downstairs and yell at her for sneaking in without us noticing!

After that we hung out with her in the living room for a while, and she regaled us with her Wicked soundtrack, which the kids all clamored for as soon as they heard the name (go figure).  They did have to put up with about 5 minutes of my Disney station on Pandora while they tried to decide what to listen to. Heh heh! 

At some point we regaled Kendra with the barbershop arrangement of "Hey Mary Lou" that we had whipped together...

Later after various other activities including listening to a lot of Wicked songs, Mommy had us gather in the kitchen to assemble our Tinfoil Dinner suppers. Originally she had planned to cook them out in our burnpile I mean bonfire pit. Since it was way too wet and rainy, we were just going to cook them in the oven instead. I had just finished a nice suite of push-ups and other strength training, so I could  barely safely slice the potatoes, or at least so I felt. Mommy had raw burger for us to each mush into our own hamburgers and layer into our dinners. When I realized Kendra was starting to giggle as I absentmindedly watched her collecting her hamburger, I spotted her blue surgical gloves and my eyes popped. "Kendra?? Seriously?!"  She adamantly held that human guts were ok but raw animal meet creeped her out. Unfortunately I didn't quite get a good picture, I had to run upstairs for my phone and by then she was peeling them off in the trash... 

While waiting for dinner to cook, some of us played the card game Scum. I was Scum most of the time, maybe Vice-Scum once. The story of my life.

And so we happily sat around the huge family table later, diving into our tinfoil dinners, discussing everything from bone tones (ask Kendra about that) to Colorado to how car transmissions work. 

Then there was cake and ice cream and further evening stuff which I can't recall.... Till the little boys went to bed and we watched the next Harry Potter movie, #6. Kendra was quite determined to have a movie night with us even though she was getting up before 5am the next morning to get to her next class in Des Moines. This HP movie is not one of my favorites and I conveniently had to leave the room to attend to something at the worst scene, I think the one with the Inferi.

And I think that's all... A typical day, nothing super amazing but just good to be home in the lovely normalcy of family. Oops, I had better stop thinking about it because now I want to go back and hug my siblings again.  Want to have my 5th brother want to play more computer games with me and my 4th brother want to play chess with me, want to sing with my 3rd brother and read the stories my 4th sister writes, and actually I want to just sit on the couch between Kendra and Carolyn again, surrounded by sisters and goofing off.

I am not proofreading any of this, that is my new rule of thumb! at least for tonight.