Family Tradition

Is it a right of passage for all the cousins to play in the muck in Great grandand's (my grandfather) backyard on Thanksgiving and get incredibly dirty so that they have to be declothed and scrubbed before dinner? And so they sit at dinner naked waiting for their clothes to be cleaned? Well it is in our family. For a long time my kids had been the only kids at these family celebrations. Only one of my cousins has children. And they are younger then mine...So this year was the first year they were all old enough to really play together and get in trouble together.
The mistake was letting them go outside alone! You would think, as adults, we would know that. But as happens often, you get together with those you don't see often, and the conversations take off. You get involved and, well, I think we kind of forgot about the little ones. They were content, not bothering anyone, quiet...So no one worried. Then we found them crawling in the dirt through a tube and under a neighbor's fence!

It brings back such memories! My grandfather lived in a different house when I was a kid. His backyard went up a hill, so it had these tiered levels, used mostly as gardens. As children, my cousins and my brother and I used to run wild back there during holiday get togethers. We would play hide and seek, chase, freeze tag. All up and down therse leveled gardens, with big bushes, trees, brush, flowers rocks and wood. It was dirty, dangerous stuff. Not run-out-in-the-street-get-hit-by-a-car kind of dangerous, but we got our share of bumps and bruises through the years. And I remember that my parents were in their own world, chatting with relatives, and us kids...we weren't even there. We had the run of the place. I would go hours with out even seeing my parents.

and so the tradition lives on!