Photo courtesy of JLYNN PHOTOGRAPHY
And now here is Jason with with his October post....
To put it simply, our family is different.
Yes… I know… Everyone thinks that his or her own family is the craziest group of people around and is deserving of its own sitcom. I can’t count the times I’ve heard someone casually toss out the phrase “they should really make it into a TV show” after telling some mildly entertaining story about one of their relatives. So don’t worry, I’m not about to claim that our family is in any way more worthy of having a camera crew follow us around than your own may be—but still, I feel as though it is at least a subject worth touching upon.
For instance, I can comfortably say that under most circumstances we are at least remotely reasonable people, but put us all together on a croquet court or in front of a board game and the result is always at least one utterly savage argument. Now I don’t want to give the impression that we’re all a bunch of hotheads running around and swinging mallets over a possible double tap, I’m just trying to paint an accurate picture of the unhealthily competitive nature of our relationships towards each other (I mean I’m willing to bet you’ve never seen more dictionaries at one game of scrabble). As children, we had to write our own rulebooks for most of our games simply because we came across countless scenarios not covered by the actual rules. And don’t even bring up Cranium… One sister may or may not have declared that I was “not even a real person!” during a particularly ugly battle over the validity of the use of a singular form of a word when the answer called for the plural.
Jenni would probably want me to mention that we aren’t always arguing. In fact, these days there seems to be an unspoken agreement that no games are to be played at family gatherings, and in spite of our childhood clashes, we remain unusually close. In fact, my youngest sister Jamie is the only sibling to not have lived with Jenni and Jon at one point or another (but with the rising frequency of her visits, I’m actually shocked that she hasn’t started receiving mail at their home). Somehow in our youth, I think Dana, Jamie, and I all developed the misguided notion that Jenni somehow knows everything. Take Jamie, for example… a capable decorator in her own right, she can’t even purchase a piece of furniture for her own home without first seeking Jenni’s approval (or pick paint color for her bedroom… or which book to read next… you get the idea).
Just look what happens to Jamie and her overwhelming fear of crowds when Jenni isn’t around to direct her… It's taken directly from the Boston Celtics' jumbotron a couple of years ago, and trust me, its worth watching.
In recent years Lillie and Lola have thrown a bit of a wrench into the family dynamic. Its not necessarily a bad thing, but should a six month old really be the one determining our holiday plans? To say that our family obsesses over its new additions would be a bit of an understatement. Its as though with each new thing Lola learns, a family announcement is in order, and with each word Lillie says, one of us is ready to pounce on the opportunity to win her affection. Its fine for now, but I wonder if that will all change when they’re old enough to play croquet…
We'll do just about anything for them... For now.
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