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!