Growing up, I was blessed with many siblings in cousins on both sides of my family. I don't ever remember not having someone my age to play with at family gatherings; it was more an issue of who to play with or finding someone I knew the best.
That's not the case for my nieces and nephew. My oldest nieces are in college. My nephew is 13, my other niece is 9. They also have lived very far apart all their lives, so most holidays they don't see each other. With my birthday coming immediately before Christmas, my birthday has become something of a "tradition" to be celebrated with the two younger ones (because they live near my parents who we are visiting at the time). Carly has taken it upon herself the last two years to "plan" birthday parties for everyone. She discusses it with her Mom or my mother, and designates who is buying, baking what. She doesn't always get what she wants (like last year for my 40th when she just KNEW I wanted a fancy cake with purple and pink sparklies and my sister bought me a cookie cake instead with Peanuts characters...she was quite amazed to find out I loved chocolate chip cookies and even more surprised to find those some cartoon characters on a wall in my house when she visited this summer....yes, Mom does know some things!), but she does her best. So this year we played "Pin the Tail on the Donkey (more like Aunt Monica, Carly, and Mason played), and had a pinata (which only the two kids hit and she was the only one scrambling for the candy...yeah, we adults are boring that way), but there were a few other interesting things as well:
1. The decor...I don't think I would have pictured myself as a zebra kind of girl, but that's what we had: zebra plates and matching table cloth (which of course matched her shirt):
That's not the case for my nieces and nephew. My oldest nieces are in college. My nephew is 13, my other niece is 9. They also have lived very far apart all their lives, so most holidays they don't see each other. With my birthday coming immediately before Christmas, my birthday has become something of a "tradition" to be celebrated with the two younger ones (because they live near my parents who we are visiting at the time). Carly has taken it upon herself the last two years to "plan" birthday parties for everyone. She discusses it with her Mom or my mother, and designates who is buying, baking what. She doesn't always get what she wants (like last year for my 40th when she just KNEW I wanted a fancy cake with purple and pink sparklies and my sister bought me a cookie cake instead with Peanuts characters...she was quite amazed to find out I loved chocolate chip cookies and even more surprised to find those some cartoon characters on a wall in my house when she visited this summer....yes, Mom does know some things!), but she does her best. So this year we played "Pin the Tail on the Donkey (more like Aunt Monica, Carly, and Mason played), and had a pinata (which only the two kids hit and she was the only one scrambling for the candy...yeah, we adults are boring that way), but there were a few other interesting things as well:
1. The decor...I don't think I would have pictured myself as a zebra kind of girl, but that's what we had: zebra plates and matching table cloth (which of course matched her shirt):
2. The cake: Mom had a variant on her traditional home-made cake with chocolate icing. For years, I was convinced it was a caramel icing, and was quite surprised when I started helping cook and discovered it was: peanut butter. I think Mom was relieved and pleased that I not only remembered that but suggested it when she asked. It's both easy and delicious. It was also Carly's first time having one of my childhood favorites, and I don't think she was impressed. At all.
3. Game time...several people in my family are big Monopoly players. This year I bought and tried out Monopoly Empires (because it claims to be a faster version of the game and my younger sister and I share a mutual dislike of really long games), and we brought it to AL with us. We discovered something new and disturbing...when a child has never had to play games with other children...they don't know how to lose. She pouted, she cried, she cried with BIG crocodile tears, and Uncle Bobby and Aunt Monica and her Mom hardened their mean old Grinch hearts and "stole" her favorite billboard tiles and "made" her lose the game. And to make it even worse? It happened again the next day with different players. Life's not fair. Get used to it. I sound so much like my mother!
The craziest part of the first evening was when I told her she needed to clean the table before we put the game down, as I didn't want Uncle Bobby's Christmas present to get messed up. She immediately put that hand on her hip, looked at me with a frown and said "How can you afford this?" We all looked at each other in surprise. One of us asked her what she meant. She shook her head incredulously and said "Y'all are just poor farmers. You can't afford this." It was all we could do not laugh. Owning chickens does NOT make us farmers, and we are certainly not classified as poor. I guess since we don't have smart phones, a Wii, an XBox, and ipad, nor cable (and I told her she needed to send me a different list when she requested a Kindle Fire for Christmas...that was not in our budget), and we eat the eggs from our chickens and have our own garden...in her mind we are very poor. Perspective is truly everything!
But when all is said and done: I love the time we have together and wouldn't trade it for anything in the world
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