Family–A 24 Hour Business
Life is busy isn’t it? I don’t know why we only get 24 hours in a day, somehow it just doesn’t seem like enough time. It may be enough for those who do not have children, or those who are completely lazy and have nothing on their calendar. But for the rest of us out here, we could use more time per day! I’M SERIOUS!
With the business of each new day comes the need for creativity in the realm of quality time spent with the kiddos. This can get pretty fun at times…like the other night when we were all asleep in the house, and decided at the last minute that it would be fun to cram all eight of us into a small half bathroom for an hour in an intense game of hide and seek with a tornado.
At first, we were a little apprehensive to start the game, but the warning siren from town gave us that little extra push. Once the storm hit, we were then a little unwilling to end the game. In fact…it took two calls from my parents to convince us that the threat was over, and that we could extract ourselves from the tiny room! I hope we all understand how blessed we are that that storm passed us by. I know my family is.
The other day, Cheryl had a few big donations come into the thrift store and she needed to get over there and organize some of it, so her volunteers would not come into a large mess on Monday morning. We ate dinner, and then planned to go over to Sunrise for a few hours and help her with the task as a team. When we arrived, Cheryl and the older kids went downstairs to begin working on the load, and I grabbed a broom and made my way outside with the twins to sweep the sidewalk in front of the store.
We had a pretty fun time at the store, and it took about two hours to get the work done. The square is a really cool place to be, at night, and we as a family agree that it would be awesome to have more food places open at night with tables on the sidewalks. A night life could really do the business square some good!
Well, after the work was done I went downstairs to retrieve the family. When I got to the bottom of the ramp, I found the children in a full blown game of hide-and-seek. There is a lot of “stuff” down there…and it’s the perfect place to hide. Being a Sunday, the schedule had been ridiculous, and the children were intent on blowing off some steam. When I tried to get them ready to leave…they informed me that they had other plans!
My son stated that it was time for us to play…“HIDE AND DON’T GET SHOT!” I have to admit, I was curious. The game goes like this…you grab something from the merchandise that resembles a firearm or shooting weapon. Any kind of firing weapon; machine gun, bazooka, missile launcher, or pistol, it really doesn’t matter. The only thing that really matters is that you can make a cool shooting noise with your mouth; and that you can make it loud enough for all other opponents to hear. Your very survival depends on it!
At the count of 20, everyone hides, and then tries to get to base without getting “mouth shot” by a wooden lamp that doubles as a very convincing grenade launcher that is being pointed at you by a six year old. Sophie is a mean shot with that there grenade launcher! We played for a while and had a blast!
When I deemed it time to wrap up the game and leave, I went looking for Cheryl in the sorting room. Cheryl wasn’t in the sorting room I would soon come to find out. She was hiding in a clothing rack armed with a 44 caliber Crayola Art Lamp, and she shot me with that lamp and won the game! We really did have fun, and it reminded us once again how to be a family within the business of a 24 hour day.