A visit from Diana's brother!

Back in October, Diana's little brother texted me to see if he and his family could stop by for a visit on their way to see April's family for Christmas. We spent the next two months looking forward to their visit (though by the state of our house that might not have been obvious). 

I opened the door and was greeted with a little "Pika! Pika!" from W (who was waving about his Pikachu doll) and almost immediately after got a hug from "Reddy" the red panda (and travel companion of L). April happened to be wearing a Bluey shirt (technically, I suppose it was a Muffin shirt) so Phoebe immediately felt she was pretty safe. And then there's Diana's brother—who had Zoë wondering why he'd write "I can't wait until you are dead" on someone's wedding day.

The very unsatisfactory answer is that he was 13 years old and...that's it. 

We had pizza for dinner on Friday. Andrew had had to take Benjamin to swim practice and then meet up at the church to get a new calling (Elder's Quorum 2nd counselor) and then came home briefly before heading out to pick up pizza. Grandpa and Darla planned to pick Benjamin up from swimming and come over for dinner. I was trying to get the kids to clean up the basement...for the third time this week...and scrounge up enough pillows and blankets...because we had company coming.

Did we have 2 months' to prepare? Sure. 

But there's always time to procrastinate (and always more to do)! 

I think Grandpa, Darla, and Ben arrived first. And then the Gillespies. And finally Andrew arrived with what everyone had been waiting for—the pizza.

We ate dinner, Grandpa and Darla had to run, and then we let the little kids run amok while we played Nerts. I dominated the table. We put the kids to bed and then chatted until late in the evening. 

In the morning we got ready to head to the stake primary activity—Cookies, Cocoa, and Carols. They've put it on the past few years before our big stake Christmas fireside to give the primary children a chance to practice singing the songs they'll be singing in the fireside. It works out really well if their primary chorister (that's me) gets her wires crossed and teaches the kids "Picture a Christmas" rather than "The Nativity Song" (oops). I don't even know how I did that because I remember checking the email multiple times to make sure I had the right song (I didn't) and then made a new slideshow for "Picture a Christmas" because my kids hadn't learned that one yet (I had been hoping we would do "The Nativity Song" because we sang that last year so I already had a slideshow ready for it). 

Turns out my brain just really wanted to teach the kids "Picture a Christmas." 

So that's what we did. 

But they have pretty good memories, I think, so it wasn't too difficult for them to pick up on "The Nativity Song" yesterday. We also sang "Star Bright" (but in Spanish...and I did remember to practice that song with my primary kids). 

The primary party is an open house situation, with a cookie decorating station in one room, a craft in another room, some games in another room, and at the end of the hall a BINGO station where the kids could make their own BINGO card using stamps and then...play BINGO. 

Cookies and crafts are always very popular stations, so Sister Branham came into the craft room (where Phoebe, wearing her Bluey sweater, was sipping some hot chocolate while L was making a rather elaborate star to hang on his Christmas tree at home). 

"Remember to go play BINGO!" she cheerfully announced. "It's fun! There's prizes! It's right at the end of the hall!"

We stayed put while Phoebe was sipping her cocoa and the boys were finishing up their ornaments. 

"Will you watch me play with the Bluey toys?" Phoebe asked. 

"What Bluey toys?" I asked. "I don't think..."

"At the end of the hall," she prompted. "That lady said we can play, like...Bluey...or something..."

"Play Bluey...?" I repeated. "Oh! You mean BINGO! So, this BINGO game has nothing to do with Bluey, but it's fun! We can go play BINGO when you're finished with your hot chocolate."

(For those not in the know, Bluey is one of Phoebe's favourite shows. She's pretty particular about what she'll watch—Daniel Tiger, Bluey, Frozen, and now Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. And that's about it. Anyway, Bluey is the titular character of that show. She's a blue heeler puppy and her little sister is a red heeler named Bingo, thus the confusion over a BINGO/Bluey game). 

In an act of...rebellion/ingenuity/stubbornness/indifference...Phoebe used a ladybug stamp to fill her BINGO card. I tried to get her to use a few other stamps—a nice candy cane? Perhaps a mitten? 

She was adamant about putting a ladybug in every single square. 

A genius move to get a blackout in a single draw, honestly, but it made for a rather boring game otherwise. She soon abandoned her BINGO card to go play in the nursery with Diana's brother and his boys (they'd found some slides and things). Rachel had come with us to be another adult (April stayed behind to visit with Reid) and to see some of her friends that she knew would be volunteering at the event. She sat at the BINGO table and waited for ladybug to be called...but it simply never happened. 

Somehow Phoebe ended up with a prize anyway.

Here are the kids decorating cookies (I'm trying not to show off other peoples' kiddos here...so I picked picture with limited faces). 

They had so many fun sprinkles and toppings to choose from! 

Once we'd exhausted the available activities, we headed back home. Rachel was too afraid to drive home because she was worried she'd have to merge on the highway and she didn't want to do that. And obviously I didn't want to drive home. So Diana's brother offered to make the drive home since merging apparently doesn't make him feel victious. 

Victious is what W told me he sometimes feels when...I honestly can't remember when he feels victious because it was such an interesting word. 

"Do you mean anxious?" I asked. 

"No!" he insisted. "I mean victious. With an F!"

(He was definitely saying it with a V in the front). 

I have to say, it sounds like an emotive word. I'm all for it!

L taught the kids to say "Hush Puppies" instead of "Quiet Game," and he takes the game quite seriously, gesticulating wildly whenever someone makes a noise (instead of blurting out, "You lost!" like my kids are prone to do, often making the game louder than a quiet game should be). 

Diana's brother taught the kids a card game that I...can't seem to ever remember the title of. Is it Nervous? Is it Anxiety? Trepidation? Jitterbug? I'm thinking we should call it Victious. It's similar to Taco-Cat-Goat-Cheese-Pizza, but it is played with a standard deck of cards and instead of repeating "Taco, cat, goat, cheese, pizza," players say the name of cards in order beginning with ace, so "Ace, two, three...nine, ten, jack, queen, king." If a player ever says the name of the card they happen to be playing everyone races to slap the pile. 

*****

We had IKEA for dinner on Saturday night—mashed potatoes, meatballs, roasted vegetables, cranberry sauce... It kind of mirrors the "Swedish Meatball" plate you can get at the IKEA restaurant...for $12 a plate! So we just make it at home because it's far cheaper that way. All the kids call it "IKEA," even Phoebe who have never set foot inside an IKEA (and Alexander who has no memory of ever visiting IKEA). 

Lingonberries are basically cranberries. I know some people would fight me on that, but they're in the same family, and lingonberries are difficult to source here. We figure it's a fine substitute. 

W got a whistle in his Christmas cracker! How super-duper fun to have in the van for the rest of their trip!

I also had a number of Christmas crackers, so we went ahead and opened those before dinner. Many good sports put on their crowns for a picture before removing them for dinner. Some, like Phoebe, kept them on for quite some time. 

Diana's brother was the only one who kept his crown on...long into the evening. He's always been the sportliest of good sports. He even wore his when we took the kids on a walk to admire our neighbour's Christmas lights (both the house with the shark eating Santa and the house with a blow-up Santa that is literally taller than the house).

While the kids played the Switch, we started a game of Hand and Foot. We took a break to get the kids into bed (I read them the weirdest chapter from The Good Master—the rest of the book is rather sweet and benign, but the chapter where Kate gets kidnapped by gypsies gets a little...racist...and crazy; W fell asleep on the couch, so we just left him there) and then continued with our game. 

I...won...by a ridiculous margin. I had over 7000 points by the end of the game. The three lowest scores added together didn't even come up to 7000. It was embarrassing. 

I like winning occasionally, but two nights in a row? That seems excessive. 

Rachel had made a chainsaw-themed birthday cake for W and we put the leftovers in a container (which I didn't even check to see whether they took—I hopes so!). We purposely chose a container they would not be obligated to return, should they want or need to take the cake on the road, but I joked that we'd have to switch that to a container they'd have to return so we had a guarantee they'd come back!

Diana's brother has never been one to hold a grudge, so he promised he'd return—container or no container. 

Here we are in the morning before we left for church (extra early for choir practice—we are really looking forward to the 10:30 schedule next year!) and before April and Diana's brother left for Florida:

We took a picture of all the kids sitting around the Christmas tree and then had Rachel take this picture of us. Diana's brother has a tradition of taking selfies with friends and family he visits throughout the year—"Only because we don't typically have capable photographers around!" he claimed—but we didn't want to be left out of the selfie action so we took one of those as well.

We consider the Gillespies a little closer than friends—our lives have been intwined for so long that they're definitely family-adjacent. It helps that Diana married Andrew's cousin Richard...so their kids and our kids are second cousins (though we don't really count generations, do we?). We may as well claim all the Gillespie cousins as cousins then, right?

*****

When I sent a picture of our IKEA dinner to my family chat, my sister Kelli responded, "Was there explanation why he wanted your husband dead? *assuming I have the right person..."

She was very invested in that story as well, apparently. 

Then she went on to offer a joke.

"You all know the world is 70% water, right?"

I told her Diana's brother works in water (he's a chemical engineer (right?) at Koch) so we were all very invested in the punchline of that joke. 

"And none of that water is carbonated..." she continued.

"Well..." Diana's brother cringed (and he's right—Germany has some naturally carbonated springs, for example). 

Undeterred (because she wasn't in the room to hear the "Well..."), Kelli continued, "Confirmation the world is flat!"

That punchline won everyone's approval and got a hearty laugh around the table.

We also read the jokes that came in our Christmas cracker. Our favourite was this:

"What side of a chicken has the most feathers?"

People puzzled about it for a long time, with most determining that the top has the most feathers. 

Is there more area of chicken on the top? Probably so, right? I mean, the head counts as the top, and there are often extra feathers there. Because of the anatomy of a bird quite a lot of it can count as the "top" of the bird, rather than the bottom. Birds have a pretty narrow base, so depending on where you say the bottom part of the bird ends, you could include tail feathers in the top portion.

Plus, the wings also count as being the top of a bird, right? There are a lot of feathers on wings. 

Surely the joke didn't mean the left side or the right side of a chicken.

Birds are fairly symmetrical creatures, so either side would have approximately the same amount of feathers. You couldn't really divide a chicken that way to decide which side has the most feathers. 

At this point I'm mostly just using up space so that you have time to think about the joke before I reveal the answer, because the answer had us all in stitches. We were laughing so hard.

It's such a dad joke—so simple, so obvious, yet the last thing you'd likely think of. 

At any rate it was the last thing that any of us thought of...

So what side of a chicken has the most feathers?

The outside, of course!

*****

It was so fun to have the Gillespies here, to talk about old memories, and get caught up on recent happenings. Stop by any time, friends!!