The Family Reunion Disaster
Our family reunion was exactly what I expected. Utter chaos surrounded by love, high pitch screams, too much food, and one disaster.
I imagine everyone who has been to a family reunion has a similar experience. Kids you haven’t seen in two years have shot up like NBA recruits. Several cousins have gone through different hairstyles. Small children find the best moments to completely embarrass their parents by doing what they do at home, like disrobing in public, despite all the bribes on the trip up. People who irritate each other over email, still irritate each other in person, but pretend not to be irritated until the last day.
Every night we all gathered around my grandmother – the one to blame for all of us, joked my uncle – and compared notes on our kids, our lives, and, of course, our mothers. Just like our kids will do in a few years.
It was going great, except for one little thing. My kids discovered I write this column.
Of course they’ve known about the column from the start, but somehow a little bell went off in their heads.
Surely this is not how Hannah Montana got started. Or, God forbid, Jessica Simpson.
Possibly it was because a few relatives asked if I was going to write about this or that during the trip, possibly because someone said “I read that in your mommy’s column,” but whatever the reason, the trap has been sprung and now my leg is good and caught.
For five days my daughters have looked up from every single activity and asked “are you going to write about this in your column?” At one point I thought it had faded away, then Mireya sunk a remarkable putt during putt putt and turned around and exclaimed, “Mommy! You can write about this in your column!”
Sierra suggested I include something about her whitewater rafting just as we were getting nailed by a bucket of ice cold water from the raft filled with “those boy cousins.”
Yikes. Sure, I’m used to my daughters mugging for the camera, but mugging for the keyboard?
Well, it looks like I’ll have to write about some other kids for a while until mine drop their guard and return to being their regular crazy selves. So if you see me taking notes in Landa Park, please, don’t call the sheriff.
That would be way too funny.
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