Big, Dumb Micah Quotes

This is a progressive collection of all the dumb things my beloved little brother, Micah, has said, done or believed in his life. :)

1. "One time, when I was in college, I caught a fish as long as the road!"-while the rest of us are talking about fish we've caught. He must have been about 4 or 5 here. What a nut!
2. As you can see above, Micah used to talk about his days in college or in high school before he had even been to grade school.
3. Being like 1 and a half or 2 and pointing to an 8 year old and calling him a baby.
4. Tying anything and everything into impossible knots from age 2 to 10.
5. Needing his chocolate soy milk in a bottle until he was 5.
6. Believing that our pastor was Jesus.
7. Infamous for putting clothes on inside out AND backwards. (underwear are hard :))
8. Believing my older sister, Abigail, was 6 years old when Micah was 8. He cried because he thought we were all, my Dad included, lying to him that she was older than both of us.
And perhaps the best of all:
9. At 6 years old, my sister found out she was pregnant with my first nephew. When she told us all the good news, Micah began crying uncontrollably. My Mom asked him what was wrong to which he replied that he didn't want to be an uncle because he knew it meant he had to grow up instantly and get a job and move out of the house. Oh Micah. :)

That's all I can think of for now. I'll be sure to update this list in the near future. It's too bad Micah's a tall, attractive, track star now because I can't make fun of him for stuff anymore! Dumb!

Speedway

Have you ever spent the better part of 4 hours searching for loose change throughout the house just so that you could go to the gas station to buy ramen noodles, soda, cheetos, cappuccino, and candy? I have. This was a regular pass time of my siblings and I.
Not being allowed to have any sort of junk food, we would wait until we were home alone or until our parents were distracted, and then go to Speedway, the gas station about 3 or 4 blocks away, on our bikes, and somehow carry multiple bags of snacks and boiling hot cappuccinos back to our house. There were many times where only one or two of us would go to get cappuccinos for all 4 or 5 of us. We had to ride our bikes no-handed, or with one finger on the break. Honestly, I'm surprised we still have skin on our hands and arms even after all the burning liquid.
Another problem with out methods was the ridiculous amount of change we used to pay for these forbidden snacks. We very rarely had any paper money. In fact, it was mostly pennies. None of us wanted to have to go up to the register with handfuls of pennies, so this is how it usually went: "Okay, if you go in and pay this time, I'll carry all the cappuccinos" A fair trade. Then the appointed 6 year old kid would slowly shuffle up to the register and pay for about $20 worth of junk food in mostly pennies, avoiding eye contact all the while. Usually, we would have to meet at the end of the cal de sac or at the playground and consume the majority of our food so we could ditch the evidence of the items that wouldn't fit under out shirts before going home. Even then, we would have to do our usual method in reverse to get back into the house. Send a "volunteer" scout to assess the location of our parents, who inevitably gets caught and is made to vacuum, thereby creating the necessary diversion for us to sneak inside with the stuff.
Like I said in an earlier post, that method was used every day for everything.

Leaves

In the spirit of fall, I shall tell ye ole tale of the triumphant gathering of leaves! To all of you Shakespearian types out there, don't get too excited. It's not a meaningful tale at all. It's a story about a bunch of dumb kids who drove their parents crazy and probably embarrassed them in front of the entire neighborhood year after year.
I only remember doing this with a few of my closer siblings, but the rest of them probably did it before I can remember too. In fact that's probably one of the very valuable things we learned from them. Such wonderful role models they were. Obviously this story is about us gathering leaves, but the less obvious part is how. First we would rake our own lawn to begin our pile in the front yard. Pretty obvious, right? Next we would move on to the neighbor's curbs. We would go around the cul de sac with garbage bags and fill our bags with any leaf piles we found on the curb. Still seems pretty normal. But then, once we had cleaned the curbs, we would go to the houses with unraked leaves and ask if we could rake their leaves up. When we were done, they would say thank you and ask how much we wanted them to pay us. We were baffled. Money? We just want the leaves! The golden, crispy, precious leaves! What was money compared to that?! Silly grown ups. They just didn't understand.
Once we had a sufficient pile about the height of a sky scraper and the width of Texas, we would then burry ourselves (sitting upright) completely so that we could just barely see the street, but no one on the street could see us. And of course, the grand finale was jumping out at unsuspecting pedestrians. Our poor parents.

Soda

Growing up, my mom never let us have soda, because in every soda container, whether it be bottle or can, there is a tiny demon living inside. Everybody knows that. There was a time when my mom found an empty coke can in my sister's and my room. This particular can actually belonged to our friend who had been over that day. I'm not sure if she didn't believe us, or just wouldn't let us get a word in; but either way, she proceeded to give an hour long lecture on the dangers of drinking soda. One can, she said, could give us liver failure, kidney failure, general organ failure, amputated limbs...after which, of course, both of us suddenly began to picture ourselves taking a sip of soda and suddenly having all our limbs pop off at the same time. Needless to say we didn't take her very seriously...and then one day, all of our limbs just popped off, and didn't we feel like idiots then!
But anyway, back to the real world. My mother's strict rules about soda cruelly forced us into the deep bowels of high fructose corn syrup deficiency, which, of course, gave us super soda sensors...*dramatic music playing*...It was a day just like any other. I was in the upstairs bathroom doing what any normal 11 year old girl would do in a bathroom (most likely trying on all of my sisters' makeup at the same time), when suddenly I heard a noise. It was a faint noise, which anyone else probably would have dismissed. But I knew that sound immediately. I thought to myself, "could it be?! NO it can't be!!! It has to be! How could this be?!", ran downstairs at top Pardee speed (which is pretty fast if you don't know any Pardee's), and sure enough, there it was on the table. An opened, but full can of Pepsi, just sitting there, waiting for me. My next thought was, "this is too good to be true, it must be a trap!" I looked around cautiously and tiptoed up to the table. But just as soon as the sweet high fructose corn syrup nectar touched my lips, an angry voice behind me shouted, "Marta! Dang it I knew if I left that can here for one second, someone would hear it and drink it!" Alas...I was not victorious.

Scams

Growing up with many older, cunning siblings, it wasn't uncommon to get scammed out of things on a daily or weekly basis. These scams included, but were not limited to:

1. Being asked to make someone a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, because "I made them the best way", not because they were too lazy to make their own. I was four. How can a four year old's sandwich possibly top a 14 year olds?

2. Being asked for something and being promised $5 in return for said item or service. Later being handed a sheet of paper with $5 written on it and being told "I never said it was gonna be real money!".

3. Being traded my paper money for pennies because "the metal was so much more valuable than the paper".

4. "If you tell Mom you did it, I won't hit you harder."

5. "Micah, you're the youngest, and mom cuts you the most slack. Just tell her you did it so we can all stop standing in the kitchen. She won't get mad at you."

6. "Marta, seriously, tickle my back for a little while! I promise I'll tickle yours after." 10 minutes later, "Marta I'm too tired, I'll do yours tomorrow, promise." Yea right.

Ant Rolling

Since my closest in age siblings and I spent most of our time outside, we had to find ways to entertain ourselves throughout the day. One of our games was Ant Rolling. We would split into our task forces first. My little brother and I usually got stuck with the worst job, picking up ants. We tried to find the biggest and the best ants. The problem was that bigger ants tend to bite when picked up. When we had enough, we'd bring them back to the driveway where the rest of my siblings were doing their jobs. Their jobs included grinding up different colored chalk into little piles, rolling the ants in the chalk, and then naming them. I know...clearly we were disturbed children. But anyway, the goal was to roll your ant in multiple different colors so that the head was blue while the butt was yellow. You can see why we needed the bigger ants for this. If we used smaller ones, they usually died in the harsh rolling process. And lastly came naming. I can not for the life of me remember any of the names we chose. I'm sure they were everything our 4-10 year old vocabularies could muster and more. Fred, Jim, Tom, Tim, Anne, Jane. Amazing stuff like that.

Worm Hunting

My last post about thunderstorms reminded me of another strange thing my siblings and I spent probably way too much energy on. One of our big activities was worm hunting. Many resources were spent "hunting for worms" because we were planning on going fishing...We rarely actually went fishing of course, but that's what we told ourselves. Worm hunting could be done in several different fashions.
1. Wait until it rains, walk around the caldusac and pick worms out of the gutter.
2. Wait until it rains, walk around the yard in bare feet as slowly as humanly possible looking for worms sticking half way out of the ground. Attack ferociously before they can go back into their holes.
3. In a devastating situation of lack of rain, proceed to take out hose and water the lawn aggressively for a few hours to make worms come out of their holes and repeat step 2.
           

Thunder Storms!

It has been raining here for  the last few days, which reminds me of the great times I used to have outside, in the rain with my siblings. It would start to rain, and immediately we would run around in a panic looking for our swimming suits. As soon as we got them on, we were ready to launch. The most difficult part of our mission was sneaking past our mother to get outside. She was adamantly against us going outside during thunder storms. Convinced that one or all of us was sure to be struck by lightening. Which, of course, at the time was the fun of it. Step one, send out a "volunteer" scout to assess the location of the parentals. Step two, scout is caught and made to vacuum. Step three, the distraction has been made and the rest of us can slip past unnoticed. Step four, the door is awfully loud when opening and closing and gets us all caught. Step five, stand in kitchen and take 20 minute lecture on the dangers of being outside in a thunder storm. Step six, repeat the first three steps. Proceed to run around in the rain for approximately 10 minutes before being spotted and dragged inside again. Repeat until rain has stopped. Thinking back...this method actually applied to most of our activities. We really should have spent more time planning our great escapes.

Orphans

When I was little, a few of my 8 siblings and I would often get kicked outside for the duration of the day, for obvious reasons, so we would steal some eggs from the fridge, go out back, and play orphan. What were the eggs for you ask? Well imaginary orphans have to eat too okay?! The eggs were OBVIOUSLY for making soup, which we concocted by digging a wide hole in the ground, throwing some grass and other "herbs" in there, cracking an egg, and mixing it together with a stick! Genius! We never ate it of course, but I do remember being pretty tempted here and there. But that's not all that our imaginary orphan lives consisted of. We would also go to the kiddie pool (which was almost always full of nasty rain water), find a board of some sort, and wash various rags we found around the house as if we were down at the river with our washboard. We would also pick tons of dandelions (because let's face it, our yard was 3/4 weeds), peel the stems apart, and put them in the water to make "jewelry". We would also make dandelion necklaces out of the flowers. We would then sell the jewelry back and forth amongst ourselves. I'm sure there were points where we attempted to sell it to random strangers walking along the street as well. We would also build sweet forts in the bushes in our backyard. Good times as an orphan.

Names

Now, with nine kids in the family, remembering all the names correctly is a struggle even for ourselves. The list, from oldest to youngest, goes: Hannah, Lydia, Seth, Eve, Naomi, Miriam, Abigail, Marta, Micah. So when my little brother, Micah, is attempting to address me, he usually ends up going through half the names before he finally settles on mine as the right choice. My mom has developed a nice strategy for calling either Micah or myself. She has just combined our names to make "Marca", so that when she calls this from the other room, we both think it sounds like our name; so we both come to help her pick up her sock that is sitting on the ground right next to her, or some other mundane task that she could probably be doing herself, but instead chooses to inflict on our poor unsuspecting selves. She claims it's for our exercise, but we're still pretty sure she's got ulterior motives.
An interesting fact about our names is that they are all from the Bible...well...except for mine; however, my name, Marta, is just another form for Martha, so technically, I do belong! At least that's what I tell myself.
Well that's all for now!