Karina's second word leads to a random train of thought about two cousins

Karina said, "Bye" to my aunt Wednesday!  It's her second word.  Her first word was "duddy" which is not daddy, but doggy.  Too bad she doesn't say it anymore.  She's taking in a lot of information and understands a ton of words, but she says very little.  I was so excited when she told Aunt Betty "bye" as she was leaving.  Betty was in town visiting my grandmother and my mom, and it just happens to be the night I go over for dinner, so I got to see her, too!

Aunt Betty is my mom's older sister.  She lives about 2 hours away and comes to visit Nana pretty regularly.  I really enjoy seeing her and I wish we all got together more often.  When David and I were little, we used to visit Aunt Betty and Uncle Dave a lot, and they'd come down here a lot too.  Their kids are close in age to David and me--Will is a year younger than me and Anne is 2 years younger than David, who is 3 years younger than me.  I'm the oldest of the 7 biological cousins in the family (my mom's side of the family).  My mom has a younger brother, too, who has 3 kids.  His kids are the three youngest, except that Josh and Anne are the same age.  The two youngest are Colleen and Cait.  They lived farther away, about 3-4 hours, so we saw them a lot less. We would spend entire weekends with Will and Anne all the time.

 In our youth, we invented some pretty fun and crazy games and did a lot of really silly stuff:  Poison Baby, The Lava Game, and when we were older a remake of the film "Terminator 2"...sort of.  Too bad that videotape was lost.  (No, really.  It was lost.  Taped over.  Will has looked everywhere for it.).  Poison Baby was a game we played when Anne was old enough to follow the other three of us around.  Because she was the youngest (5 years younger than me), we found her to be very annoying, so she became the Poison Baby, and we'd spend the day running away from her.  Sometimes she'd complain and ask for someone else to be the Poison Baby, but she didn't get it.  She was the Poison Baby.  (Incidentally, Anne is now the only cousin of the seven of us to have her PhD. She is a school psychologist.  We are all really proud of her!)

As Anne got older, we stopped playing Poison Baby, and started playing other things, like The Lava Game.  My aunt's house had stairs, which David and I did not have at our house.  In the game, the downstairs was lava, and we were some kind of explorer people at the top.  If you fell down the stairs, as David often did, (and which was the most fun part of the game, really) then you turned into a lava monster and came after the rest of us.  If the lava monster touched you, you turned into one, too.  The only way to be safe was to go into any of the bedrooms, none of which the lava monster could enter.  The only way to become human again was to get the lava monster to go into the Ice Room.  The Ice Room was my aunt's bedroom, and was so named because of the white carpet.  Somehow David always managed to fall down the stairs (while the three of us would hang over the top, gripping his arms and hands and trying desperately to keep him from continuing down the slope to the lava, but to no avail) and become a lava monster.  We spent hours playing this game.  Hours.

Then there was the terminator video.  We were older then, and didn't play together quite as much.  David played the Terminator, and had shades and a leather jacket.  Will shot the video, I was some kind of reporter, and Anne was the victim.  In the film, Anne is killed when she falls off the balcony of a skyscraper.  We filmed this by having Anne stand on the outside of the deck railing while Will laid on the ground below her, and she jumped off the deck, screaming (I am laughing just remembering this!).  Somehow, the Terminator got involved, and in the end we destroyed him by blowing him up with a missile.  I think.  To film that, we shot this nerf toy and Will filmed it as it shot.  Since it didn't really go that far, we had to film it in stages.  After the first shot, Will stopped the frame, and I threw it past the camera again to make it look like it was still going.  Then he stopped the frame again and showed it hitting the Terminator in the chest, effectively destroying him.  Although I don't think a missile would actually have destroyed a real Terminator.

Reminiscing about these old games we used to play is so much fun.  Thanksgiving and Christmas family get-togethers are always hilarious when we start talking about all this stuff.  I can't count how many holiday meals I spent laughing til the tears rolled because of David and Will telling stories.  Now that we're all grown up (sigh), and Will and his wife live elsewhere, and Anne and her husband do too, it's hard to get everyone together every year.  I really miss having us all together.  It seems like there's always one or more of the cousins missing at any given holiday.  I think this year we might be able to get everyone together again.  Fingers crossed for that.  I can always use a good laugh-fest!!