Siblings.

Me and my sib's know how to have fun.  We learned it at an early age.

Amanda and I loved to have pretend tea parties.  We used water instead of tea, but to make things more interesting, we put sugar in our water.  We loved pretending we were adding sugar to real tea, so we would just keep adding more and more sugar. It was not very appetizing, but in our minds it was delicious.

We played Barbies a lot.  But the thing is, we rarely actually played Barbies; usually we just set up the houses.  That was the best part.  And we would always have our own houses.  The problem was, we only had one of everything, so we got creative and would make our own furniture out of cardboard.  We would even cut out food from grocery ads and back them with cardboard, so we would have well-stocked kitchens for our Barbies.

General Conference was the greatest two Sundays of the year.  We built ourselves awesome chairs out of mats and blankets and beanbags.  And it was the one time we would break out all our candy.  We had this obsession with saving all the candy we ever got.  We would trade it all the time.  But it had to be a special occasion for us to actually eat any of it.  Yes, this meant a lot of our candy went bad from us waiting years to eat it.

When Makenna came along, we had enough people to do more stuff.  Like hide and seek.  Usually it was a safe bet that someone was hiding on the top shelf in one of our closets.

Building forts was the funnest thing ever.  They were always really complicated and fragile, and took hours to build.  We would keep them up as long as Mom would let us.  Or until they fell down.  By the way, scriptures make a great weight for holding up blankets.

As a kid, every body of water was really an ocean.  And me and my sisters were mermaids.  You had to have a gemstone for a name.  I went back and forth between Sapphire and Pearl.

We used to watch Spongebob together all the time, and we still quote it to each other.

I have always liked making up games.  Why play a game that is the same every time?  It gets boring.  Plus, if you make your own game, it is tailored to your group of participants.  Here are some of my favorite games:

      (1)   Fear Factor.  This game was played two ways.  The first was the food version.  The deal was, we decide upon a number of ingredients, then each person gets to make the most awful concoction they can think of using the stated number of ingredients, then the other person has to eat two or three bites of it.  We make some NASTY crap.  Sometimes Amanda wasn’t brave enough to eat it, but I always did.  The second version of the game was played outside, and it was a bunch of different games that weren’t exactly scary, but we liked to pretend they were.  One game that was always one of the "challenges" was hanging off the side of the trampoline poles for as long as we could.  It was a test of endurance.  And out of all our friends, me and Amanda were always the best.  We would battle it out for the title.

      (2)  Real-Life Clue. This one is still popular at my house.  This game is played just like Clue, but on a huge scale.  We use pieces of paper as spaces, and lay them throughout the house, leading to different rooms.  One person is in charge of each game, and they are the ones who hide the clues in the rooms.  The clues are the weapons (things like our snowie machine were commonly used - not really sure how it was used, but it was definitely a weapon) and cards that have names and rooms written on them.  The person in charge also rolls the dice and tells people how many spaces they can move.  When someone enters a room, the in-charge person sets a timer for a few minutes, and that is the amount of time they have to search the room for clues.  It is fun because the people playing are the suspects.

      (3)  Extreme Hopscotch. Extreme hopscotch covers the whole driveway.  It could involve various things, such as flipping around backwards, hopping on one foot, jumping long distances, and completing multiple paths.  There would always be symbols on some spaces, and there was a key to show what the symbols meant you had to do.

      (4)  The Shoe Game. This is one of my personal favorites.  This game we always play in the basement.  One person hides all of my shoes around the basement.  And you have to understand, I have a LOT of shoes, so this game gets pretty intense.  Like, seriously, upwards of 50 pairs.  Anyway, once all the shoes are hidden, everyone else comes back down and tries to find them.  The catch is, you have to collect them in pairs.  Once you pick up a shoe, you can't put it down until you find its match.  So the idea is, you walk around, trying to remember where shoes are, so when you find the match you can snatch them up.  The person with the most shoes at the end wins.

      (5)  The Marker Game. Apparently I need better names for my games.  Anyway, this game was a really fun one because we played it with all the neighborhood kids.  I invented it because we all always wanted to play night games, but couldn’t find anything that we all liked other than capture the flag and line tag.  So I came up with this new game.  Everyone has their own color white-board marker.  Everyone writes their name on this big white board with their marker.  Then everyone hides their marker somewhere within the boundaries.  Once everyone has hidden their marker, everyone starts to search for other people’s markers.  You are still in the game as long as nobody finds your marker.  As soon as someone finds it, they run to the white board and cross out your name.  If you go back to the white board and find your name crossed out, you’re out.  Last one standing wins.

We liked hiding things, apparently.  We got really good at finding things.  Also losing them.  We had more Easter egg hunts than average children.  We would always count how many eggs we had (empty by the way – this habit could not sustain itself had we filled the eggs), and somehow we would always lose one, and spend hours searching for that one lost egg.

  

We also liked, when we were with our cousins, to make up silly plays or funny commercials.  Me and Amanda would be on a team together, because we were hilarious together.  You should have heard our toilet paper jingle.

We all liked to play restaurant with each other.  One person was the waiter and the chef, and the menu designer.  The others were customers.  Usually the restaurant was part of our own little economy, where we all run our various shops.  There was usually a movie theater and a spa as well.

Life is a lot more boring now.  I want to go back to having no responsibilities outside of the seven hours I spent at school.  We had fun.