When I was a young child I had the pleasure of visiting my aunt, uncle and cousin fairly regularly as they were less than two hours drive from where we lived. My cousin and I had lots of fun doing all sorts of things. I remember when she got Simon the electronic toy that you repeated patterns from and how we tried to "beat" the machine that was clearly unbeatable.
We did lots of things when I visited. She had an organ in her living room. She was a master at Monopoly and we played a lot in her back yard. Because here's the cool thing, she lived on a lake. I didn't know anyone who lived on a lake aside from my cousin, and living on a lake is just about as exciting as it gets to a pre-teen girl. There were fishing poles and bicycles and trout-catching stories and a swing set and a whole yard we could play in to have fun. And we did.
But there was one time we both remember specifically. You know how all the memories of fun experiences in one location can blur together as one big bunch of, "I really like going there because of all the great time's I've had" type thing. Was it that trip or this trip that we did such-and-such? Was it summer or winter and was it when I was six or eleven when that happened? I don't know for most of it because it's melded together in my mind at this point. But there was this one time...
For a long time I thought it was a Christmas visit, but the more I think about it it couldn't have been. Perhaps it was for my cousin's birthday because she has a birthday in May and I know the weather was very nice because we went outside to play. We went outside, specifically, because there had been a present of Silly String. Silly String is messy. Very messy. So none of that in the house. Not on your life. Outdoors right now you two!
So out we went and we made the whole back yard look silly with brightly colored string. I've bought Silly String since that time and I don't remember it having that much in a bottle. Were the bottles bigger back then or did it just seem like so much more magnificent mess to a child?
There's another memory blur that may or may not have been this trip, but it's going in this blog post regardless. I know we were swinging on the swing set. My cousin and I were excellent swingers. We must have gotten in phase and stuck there for a while because the next thing you know, the swing set fell completely over.
We were excited. I have no recollection of fear or injury at all. We felt sort of powerful I suppose. We ran into the house to exclaim to our parents what a great thing we'd done. I'm fairly certain they weren't as thrilled about the prospect of righting the swing set as we were of knocking it over.
The Big Boy Update: Last night I heard something happening in the children's bathroom upstairs. Up I ran because they had been supposedly asleep for a while. Nope, he wasn't asleep. Somehow in the dark he'd gone to the playroom and gotten all the little cars and placed them into the bigger dump truck. Then he drove the dump truck into the bathroom in the dark, took off his pants and pulled down his diaper and was sitting on the potty when I found him.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: Up above the world so high... Again and again she sings this one line to the Twinkle Twinkle song. My mother figured out what she was doing first and I sent an email to confirm to her teacher. Yes, they are singing this song at school. Angie, her teacher, says it's one of the few songs she can play on the ukelele.
Fitness Update: Gym. Sore. He brought the pain. But fun too...
Someone Once Said: Correction: Are no homely women. Some more beautiful than others.
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