Family Stories

When I was in Conway for Easter, I heard a family story I'd never heard before--and in my family, that's unusual. We like telling the same stories over and over, and laughing like we'd never heard them before. My mom's sister, Aunt Sue, told this one as she was admiring Rebecca's dolls. She said that when she and Mom were about 6 and 3, they were playing baby dolls and left them inside "asleep" while they went out for a few minutes. While they were gone, Papa (their dad) put mustard in the doll's diapers!! She said they fussed and fussed at those babies while they washed the diapers out in the toilet and hung them out to dry. What makes the story even funnier is that Papa wasn't usually the jokester--Maw was. She was not even 5 feet tall, but when my brothers and I went to stay with her for a week once, she held a broom in one hand and made a fist with the other and told us to behave because "This hand is 6 weeks in the hospital, and this one's instant death." One Christmas she decided we should draw names to buy gifts. She wrote the names on little pieces of paper and had us draw them out of a hat, instructing us to keep the name we drew a secret to make it more fun. Of course, just as she knew they would,  before an hour was up my Mom and her brothers and sister started pulling each other aside to whisper, "Who'd you get?" The conversation went something like this: "Billy, who'd you get?" "Mama! Who'd you get?" "No, I got Mama. Wait a minute--Sue! Who'd you get?" "I got Mama!" "What?! Jimmy...!" She had written her own name on every piece of paper!! I wish Mike could have met her. They would have loved each other.
I was thinking of another family story this morning, looking at our old broken toilet we're throwing away. When Mikayla was about 3, we ate with our friends Tim and Denise at the Red Lobster in Lewiston, Idaho. The kids had enjoyed looking at the lobsters in the tank and fish and crabs on the walls. As usual, as soon as the food came, Mikayla had to go potty. And you don't argue with a 3-year-old about that. So I took her in the ladies' room, led her into a stall, and as she pulled her pants down she looked into the toilet and said, "Oh, is that the crap hole?" I was of course shocked to hear such words from my precious angel's mouth, and said, "WHAT did you say???" She asked again, more clearly this time, "Is that the crab hole, where they get the crabs?" Ohhh....