SCrAbBLe

Just shared the story with a friend of the first year that the husband came home with me for the holidays, after which, I realized that we probably sound similar to a TLC show like "Honey Boo Boo" or some such. We are big Scrabble players, we all play somewhere along the way when we are together, maybe the night before Thanksgiving  or Christmas Day, sitting around; undoing the top button to let the turkey have a little more room. This was a Christmas Day if I remember correctly and two of my brothers had just gotten into it over the validity of a played word. Dad went for more pie and Mom said, “Take it outside.”

Mom was a big fan of “take it outside.” We fought each other like wild cats and as long as we took it outside, Mom didn’t have much to say either way. I still bear the scars from some of our glorious battles, especially the knee and elbow ones from the time I ran over Jon when he refused to move out of the gravel road until I gave him back his bike. I refused to give him the bike and so we were at an impasse and I had to run him over on principle. Wise? I think not, but at least we were outside. And who can forget the time that I hit David on a sneak attack with a half watermelon, lobbed perfectly from the porch right into his face as he rounded the corner of the house. Perhaps my finest hour in sibling rivalry.

The close proximity to family during the holiday, often brings out the 4 year old in me and I revert to preschool tactics like biting, scratching and eating someone’s cookie while they aren't looking. Once, to my shame, my son caught me in the middle of a slap fight with one of my brothers after a particularly long post-Thanksgiving afternoon.

 In a complete shift in paradigm, K grew up in a household where “stink” was a bad word and you never, ever said poop or anything of the sort. Any you most certainly were not allowed to “take it outside.” So he didn't know what to say or do that Christmas as my brothers rolled around in the yard punching and kicking over the validity of tile placement. He worriedly said, “Should I do something?” I said, “yeah,” and so we had some more pie too. Laters.