You would all be very proud of me. I have done it! I got my turkey it is a small fresh beauty and I couldn’t be happier. It’s so small in fact, it looks like a chicken, but it says turkey on it because I checked several times.

Now onto the real reason I am here.

When we were children my parents would leave us together alone in the house with my oldest brother babysitting. He was babysitting age, which is what every parent waits for, and it was going to be in those moments that the best games known to mankind will be invented. The first game that comes to mind is:

Whoever makes you laugh is ‘IT’!!!

How do you play? First you have a room full of imaginative kids. Then you designate the first person to be “It”. It usually goes something like this. “Becki, you be it!”

“I don’t want to be it. Have someone else be It!”

“But you hate it when we turn off the lights the first time.”

“I do Not!” standing there knowing full well that I am afraid of the dark. Being ‘It’ is very similar to being ‘whoever smelt it dealt it’ and no one ever wants to be either.

“Okay fine I will be it first.” my brother would say. “Are you ready for me to turn off the lights?”

everyone in unison “Yup!” me standing there unsure but I just made the case that I was perfectly okay with the lights being out.

Lights go out and I immediately regret all of my decisions in my short life. When the lights go on we have to be doing something to make the ‘It’ laugh. Except when the lights are off I am having a panic attack and an existential crisis because Is being possessed enough to help me win this game? Because I sure as shit am going to be unless someone turns the lights back on because everyone knows that satan is the Becki opposite and he’s afraid of the light.

The lights turn on and there I am in the middle of the room having a full on mental breakdown which everyone thinks is funny and now I am ‘It’ and I have control of the light. This helped me to have a overinflated sense of my own power at comedy and the pure joy of making someone else laugh. If I make you laugh then I control the light ergo I am the hero in this game and in life, really!!

This game is how our Raggedy Ann curtains got ripped, which totally made me laugh, won my brother the game and made us wrap the ripped curtain around the curtain rod as if it was Not ripped almost in two. We were like “Mom and Dad will never know.” Right! Because we always just ball up the curtain on the rod. That’s how it’s done. Mothers know!!! We always know. Plus it wasn’t that clever it looked like a large Raggedy Ann q-tip placed above our window. That’s a lovely window treatment you have there, is it French?

The next game was take everyone’s sheets and blankets off the bed and tack them up and create the worlds largest blanket fort. There was six beds in our house…our fort was massive. We started it in the kitchen and brought it into the living room and sometimes take it up the stairs or down the hallway. My parents would ask where the little holes in the walls came from. We always tried to use the existing holes the next time we played this game because we already got in trouble for those.

The next game involved the stairs. One person would stand at the bottom of the stairs and would have a ball. The ones at the top of the stairs would have to run across and try not get hit by the ball…but then this game began to morph into a cross between the gong show and dodgeball. Entertain the judge or get pelted in the face with the dodgeball. If you were hit by the ball you were ‘It’. Then of course came the accusations of favoritism. “That’s not fair, he’s your favorite. He wasn’t even funny!”

“Becki, you’re still it!” which I hated because I couldn’t throw the ball all the way up the stairs. One time I threw it and my brother dodged and then it landed in the toilet. That ended the game for the night and the new rule, of close the bathroom door before we played, was born.

The next game we played also involved the stairs, I’m not going to lie, we played a lot of things on the stairs. Our stairs was a bus, a car, a jail, a bank, a store…and slide. This game started with my mom promising that anyone who helped clean the house would get twenty dollars….which was the equivalent of a hundred dollars today. I wanted that twenty dollars so much that I cleaned every inch of that house. I even polished all of the wood, the cabinets, the stairs and the wood railing!!! Nothing says accident like slippery stairs and rail to hold onto. My brother almost died, or if you watched soaps, had a miscarriage. But we decided to not let a good thing go to waste. We played a game that should never, ever be played….like ever…and so it was AWESOME!!!! It was no die in the dingle though…so by my kids’ standards this was light fare. We would take our mother’s laundry basket, put a pillow in the bottom, wrap the rider up in a blanket so that they couldn’t see where they were going, and send them sailing down the slippery stairs. Don’t worry the door would stop us at the bottom. The worst was when the basket would tip sideways because you would still go down the stairs but you were suffocating in the blanket and hitting your head all the way down the stairs.

So whenever my parents would leave we knew that some hellacious good fun was at the ready. We played these games until someone puked…now that I think of it, the puker may have been concussed. But somehow someone would get hurt, or sick, or my brother’s girlfriend would call and we would all have to be quiet and try to listen in, all the while trying to pretend to be watching the muppet show. We always had a great time. Except that one time when someone puked in my hair. My hair was so long that I had to wear it up so that I didn’t sit on it…I  was super tiny and couldn’t wash it myself. My brother had to help me and he was gagging and getting annoyed because I was “blatting”. He also used dish detergent and that shit is not great for hair. I had snarls for a month after that. I should have conditioned it with some skin-so-soft.

I am not sure if any of you played games like these, or made up your very own….but we had a fun time together. I watched my kids do these things too. When left to their imaginations, kids will invent games and possibly end up concussed.

Moral of my story: Not sure there is one, we had a great time being little shits together. We loved it when our parents would leave, unless they left us with the babysitter. Our oldest brother probably didn’t love it, because sometimes we had to go on dates with him. But I was the fifth child and I didn’t have to take anyone on a date with me, so I loved it.

Happy Thanksgiving all! I am very Thankful for all of you!

Until next time.  🙂