Family focus

Spending time with family tends to present great fodder for blog posts.  Some things pretty much stay in the family – partly because others wouldn’t have the appropriate context and partly to just protect the innocent.  :-)

One thing I love about my family is that we’re all generally easy-going and willing to accommodate others.  And it’s a good thing since we had “family sleepover” the first two nights I visited.  That meant there were 8 of us sleeping within feet of each other, and 2 others on another level of the house.  It actually worked out great and none of the early-risers disturbed the others.  (Now that I’m accustomed to getting up earlier, I considered continuing the trend but didn’t want to take the chance of some little heads popping up from their pillows in hopes of play time.  So I stayed put until I heard others moving around.)

I also love my family’s passion for music.  My younger brother’s girlfriend introduced us to Christmas crackers which contained whistles.  The whistles each played a different note and were numbered.  So my younger brother played conductor and prompted each of us with his baton (by #) to play a few tunes.  It was quite entertaining.

Besides the whistles, we also spent some time in acapella singing after opening Christmas gifts together.  We even had 3- or 4-part harmonies for some songs.  Truly beautiful.  It reminded me of how we used to pass hours of travel time in Cameroon and Nigeria by singing together.  I suppose many families don’t sing together like we did (and still do) but it works for us.  :-)

We’re also a family that enjoys playing games together.  Not xbox and video games, but good ole board games and card games.  We have some tried and true games but we enjoy discovering new ones too.  We tried out a new game called Dicecapades that was a lot of fun!  A great mix of activities for both left and right brained people!  Stacking large dice on small dice on a table (or same-sized dice in the palm of your hand while standing on one foot), some trivia (which I’m terrible at but might actually remember if it’s obscure knowledge, such as arachibutyrophobia being the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth), some physical challenges (I had to arm wrestle one of my brothers, another member had to roll the dice to see how many push-ups she needed to do in 30 seconds), and so much more!  (Can you tell I liked this game??)  What I love more than the games we play is the opportunity for us to connect casually and laugh a LOT together.

I have a pretty awesome family.  We’re our own kind of “normal” and we like it like that.  :-)