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!