Memories: Sisterly Love...

Since I've never been good at keeping journals I'm going to start posting some of my random memories. This way I will have them written down before I forget them. It already seems like I'm losing my memory and can't remember as much as I think I should be able too. May be someday my kids will enjoy reading these. Heck, may be when I'm old and senile I will enjoy reading them and wonder who this person is that wrote these memories(jk).

I come from a large family with a lot of girls. I'm the oldest of 7 children-5 of which are girls. Not to mention there is only 11 years between me and the baby of the family. So we are all about 1 1/2- 2 years apart. I love having all my siblings close in age and we all get a long wonderfully. However, things weren't always that way...

I remember many times when I was old enough to babysit my younger siblings my parents would leave and we would almost immediately start fighting. My younger sisters claim that I would never take sides and that I just kind of watched them fight which drove them crazy. One day while my parents were away we had a full on water fight INSIDE the house. Not with just small cups of water, we were using juice pitchers. Needless to say when my parents came home and their entire bed was soaking wet we were all in trouble. I was known for locking my siblings out of the house if I was mad at them. On one of these many occasions my sister who is 18 months younger than me(and very stubborn) decided to ride her bike to where my parents were and tattle on me. Not such a big deal except my parents were in the next town at a rental that they owned which was 8 miles away. Those 8 miles were all highway miles too. If I remember correctly she was probably around 8 years old at the time. I couldn't believe she actually rode her bike that far-I just thought she told me she was going to do this to get me to open the door. Needless to say after that incident my parents made a rule that no one could lock anyone out of the house. Many times one of us would get mad at someone else and go in our only bathroom and lock the door. That person would then proceed to empty the other persons "underwear" drawer completely on the floor. In the meantime the siblings locked on the outside would find some kind of instrument to unlock the door and start pushing to get in. The person in the bathroom would open all the drawers so the door wouldn't come far enough open to get in. Needless to say there were doors with holes in them. Once we all became teenagers the fights still happened but they were about things like sneaking each others clothes to wear to school and then making sure you got home first so you could change so the other sister wouldn't find out...they always did though. We only had one bathroom growing up so it was always a battle in the morning for shower time and curling iron time-one curling iron-5 girls...you get the picture. I remember one of us would get in the shower and close the curtain and then holler that everyone else could come in. Once we were ready to get out of the shower we would tell everyone to get out. Once we were dressed(or at least had a towel wrapped around us), the next person would start their shower. This went on until everyone was done getting ready. My parents used to get mad at us because as teenagers we would go running through the house in our towels to get to our rooms and we had big windows that usually had the curtains open. I must admit I was seen running through my kitchen in my towel by some male friends my age. That was pretty embarrassing! Something else that I can remember is pizza nights. My parents would only order 1 large pizza for the whole family. It had 10 pieces and there were 9 of us. As soon as the box was opened we would all start "calling" which slice was ours based on the sizes of the slices. If you do the math there would be one slice left after we each got one. We would fight over it and my parents would end up cutting it into 7 pieces so we all got part of it. Growing up I got used to this and didn't think much of it. When Steve and I were engaged he was having dinner at our house one night. You guessed it we were having pizza. Including him there were 10 of us which was perfect because the pizza had 10 slices. Well he didn't exactly see it that way. He was used to his parents ordering 3 larges for him and his parents. He couldn't believe there was only one pizza for all of us. Of course my mom insisted that we get all our fruits and veggies so it's not that there was a lack of food just a lack of pizza. Everyone knows you can't just have one slice of pizza. Now I think I'm making up for lost time because Steve and I usually order 2 larges so we can have as much as we want. Now all my siblings(including my brothers) love hanging out together and never fight-at least I don't know of any fighting going on. 4 of the 5 girls live within 20 miles and I just love it! We are all trying to convince the other one that she needs to move here too. We usually see her and her family 1-2 times a year. We are all best friends and I love that our kids are growing up together.