Anniversaries, Weird Dreams, Confetti, and Growing Up Bored...

Two years down...one to go. Yay!

Not that we're counting down or anything...

Also...this past week my parents celebrated another anniversary...their 35th wedding anniversary!  

Here they are on the joyous day...

Oddly enough just last night I had this super weird and TOTALLY UNTRUE dream that my parents got divorced and that my mom was mailing dragon pins to her new boyfriend and when I asked her how old her new boyfriend was she said, "I don't know," like she didn't want to tell me, which made me KNOW (in my dream mind) that he was MY AGE.  And then I got totally mad that: 1) my mom had a boyfriend and I didn't, 2) that he was my age (yuck), 3) that my mom would leave my dad for someone who liked dragons.  

And I was so weirded and grossed out that I somehow made myself wake up and then everything was better.  

So, in conclusion, I'm glad that I'm lucky enough to have happily married parents who love each other and have somehow managed to stay together for a long, long, time and I'm REALLY glad that my mom doesn't have a 30 year-old dragon loving boyfriend.  

Anyway, every year my parents' anniversary reminds me of what my younger brothers and I used to do to help my parents celebrate their anniversary.  It probably started around the time that Ty was 4, Lee was 9, and I was 12 and lasted way too long to be normal (at least for me).  

One of us (my guess is Lee) had the great idea that while my parents were out to dinner to celebrate their anniversary, we should find every scrap of paper that we could in the house and spend the entire time they were in Idaho Falls cutting up all those papers to make confetti.  

Then, we'd carefully pile the homemade confetti on top of the ceiling fan in the family room.  We would pack as much as we could on every blade of the fan...piles and piles of confetti.  Then, when we saw the parents driving up the road we would turn off the lights and hide.  We waited for them to come into the house and then we'd turn on the lights and the fan and jump up and yell "HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!" as our beautiful confetti swirled around the room and all over everyone and everything.    

It was crucial that the lights and fan went on at exactly the same time so I doubt we ever let Ty be in charge...poor youngest child.  

Anyway, the confetti would blow ALL over the family room and usually to other parts of the house too but we thought we were SO COOL that we loved our parents enough to spend hours cutting up paper to make a confetti storm to help them celebrate their anniversary in style.

I bet it kind of drove our parents crazy.  Especially since I'm pretty sure we did it every year for the next five years (even though the element of surprise was completely gone) and because I bet we didn't do the greatest job cleaning up.  As I recall every time we turned on the fan the rest of the year a few more stray pieces of confetti would float down.  And, I'm guessing my mom found little pieces of paper around the house all year long.  

But, we loved our parents and did the best our little weird child selves could do to show them.  I don't know how in a child's brain cutting up paper and blowing it all over the house=love, but somehow it just does.  

And, besides, the confetti storm was mild compared to other things that happened while my parents were gone.  A couple that come to mind right off are:

Little 8 year-old Lee deciding it was a good idea to make cinnamon suckers BY HIMSELF while my mom was gone and spilling RED food coloring down my mom's new WHITE cabinets.  Then, because I supposedly wouldn't help Lee clean it up (I probably told him that making suckers by himself was not a good idea and may have been mad that he didn't listen to me) Lee had to call my grandma who quickly came to the rescue with a little Soft Scrub and saved the day.  Disaster averted.  

Lee and Ty deciding to put the new SHATTERPROOF ketchup bottles to the test by trying out different methods of shattering ketchup bottles on the kitchen counter.  Just for the record, the "shatterproof" bottles were not very shatterproof at all.  I somehow got involved with helping clean ketchup off the ceiling and somehow fell off the counter and into the garbage can...so, I remember very well that those bottles were not shatterproof.  

That's just the tip of the iceberg as far as things we thought were a good idea to do when the parents weren't home.  I'm sure my parents (and probably my brothers) can remember many more.  

Some people may think that we country kids are weird, but I think not having neighbors, cable TV, nearby movie theaters, parks, and malls, makes for a creative, fun, and at times, slightly wild childhood.  And, everyone knows, the weirder your childhood, the more fun you are at parties later on. 

I once met this girl who grew up total white trash in the Southern U.S. with a mom who smoked pot with President Clinton and who was really mean and scary and so when this girl's brother cut open his stomach in a 4-wheeler accident she (the girl) had to tape his stomach back together with duct tape so the mom wouldn't find out that the brother was riding a 4-wheeler.  This girl had a TOTALLY weird childhood but she is hilarious, because all she has to do is tell stories about her white trash upbringing and everybody laughs.  So see, weird childhood=funny adult.  

So sometimes I wish things could have been a little weirder at our house growing up.  But, I guess I should just be glad for the weirdness and unsupervised hours that I got to have.  

This is a really random post.

The end.