Life With Six People, Three Dogs, and a Cousin

I originally thought that a week of living would be just enough material for a blog post. I was wrong. Completely underestimating the plenitude of stimulating incidents in a house full of six people and three dogs, I couldn’t decide which story to share with the world out of the many that occurred during the hundred sixty-eight hours that comprise a week. I’m trying something new. I’ve decided to share all of them. I’m going to post pictures of all of the stories that I want to share, then I will add the stories that accompany said pictures as captions. If you like the photo, you can read the caption. Or you can skip the caption if the opposite is true. This is sort of like a choose your own adventure blog post. We’ll see if it works. (Note: If you click on a picture, blogger will show all of the pictures in slideshow format.)

1.     I accidentally saw a small-scale fireworks show. I live in the little section of Englewood between Centennial and Greenwood Village right next to the Cherry Creek State Park. It’s a nice neighborhood and a far cry from the cockroach infested dwelling we started out in as a small family in 1993. Last Sunday I decided to take a run in the dark of the evening alone in our beautiful, generally safe neighborhood. Around mile three, as I was jogging down Belleview towards Dayton, I heard gunshots. First one gunshot. Then another. Then rapid-fire shooting, at which point I thought to myself, “Well…this is happening.” And then, “Don’t you think that’s enough already?” My mother taught me to be calm and collected in the face of extreme danger or life-threatening situations. She used to say to us, “I will let you know when to panic, but right now is not the time to panic.” She had plenty of opportunity to say that in our household, given the fact that my brother and I were gifted at endangering our lives from the moment we were surgically extracted from her womb. My mother also hammered the importance of being aware of one’s surroundings into me from an early age as I was a dreamy child, prone to checking out of the real world in exchange for a more exciting world where I was the heroine and nothing, not even weapons of mass destruction, could touch me. But I have been (mostly) cured from this tendency and naturally when I had heard fifteen or so gunshots, I turned my head to the right and saw an explosion rock the sky. So I ran towards it. Now aware of the fact that the gunshots were in fact fireworks, I booked it a mile to where some branch of the Greenwood Village bureaucracy was hosting a fireworks show in the park by the Dam Road. I saw half of the show from a distance, and half on the lawn of the park, running an extra mile home and turning my light four-mile run into a five-mile run.

2.     My cousin was in town. My younger cousin Wesley visits about once a year. He is sweet, and we love him. Usually he stays for several weeks, but this year his dad (my mother’s brother) only sent him out for a week, which turned out to be a painfully short time, in which we managed to go swing-dancing, play pool, see Wolverine in the theatres, miss his flight home, and make memories. We’re already scheming about the next time he comes.

I wish this picture was more in focus, but I'm still getting the hang of my new camera.

3.     We went swing dancing!!! (The picture is blurry, but it gives the general gist of the amount of fun that we incurred from this new experience.)

4.     Morgan and I played piggyback.  In our house we frolic. A lot. Actually quite a lot, it’s been an unusual day if no one gets picked up, twirled around, poked, prodded, punched, shaken, or generally messed with. This is a fact of life in our house.  We are affectionate, and affectionately playful, which means you may be side-tackled on your way to the bathroom. You just never know. Tuesday night however, we actually noticed the occasionally unfortunate result of our frolicking. The consequence of frolicking that only presents itself on infrequent occasions, meriting a rub of the bottom or a scratch of the head to even out the resulting bumps and bruises. On Tuesday night, I asked Morgan a question she immediately knew the answer to. “Hey, do you know what time it is?” She did, and without explicitly answering my question she squatted down for me to climb atop her back. This action was out of the usual. Although Morgan is over a head taller than me and at least ten pounds heavier, I always carry her around on piggyback. I was built to haul things, for long distances, without strain on my short, stocky little body. My parents call the women in my family pack-mules, affectionately. You would think this would mean that I wouldn’t be procreating anytime soon, but we’re like a band mutant pack-mules with extra-special fertility powers, giving birth to equally effective pack-mules with thick legs and dense muscles. I responded to Morgan’s unwonted actions explaining that she always fell, and that since I never fell on the floor, I should be the one to run around the house with her on my back. “But I’m stronger now!” She said. My own mother echoed the sentiment so I submissively climbed atop her back and rode there about ten feet. At which point her feet slipped out from under her. Normally Morgan falls forward during this game, providing the little pack-mule with a nice, Morgan shaped cushion. This time she didn’t, and came tumbling down on top of me after catching plenty of air on the way down. I imagine this is how a jockey feels after an unpleasant run with a wild horse as he rolls out from underneath the braying beast. I am not saying Morgan is beast-like, nor am I saying that she weighs more than half a ton. I am simply saying it hurt. Immensely. But as I rolled from my back onto my pack-mule belly, gasping for air as my solarplexis came back to life, I couldn’t help from laughing. And laughing. And laughing. Because these are the war stories I will tell my grandchildren a hundred times when I’m senile and too stubborn to accept assisted living care.

5.     Morgan and I went shopping. That’s unexciting. But our trip to Lush wasn’t. Lush is a store that claims their products are au natural while displaying neon bath bombs and facial scrubs full of food coloring made from crushed beetles and who knows what other chemicals. But they’re beautiful nonetheless. And the store is awfully alluring. We walked in thinking that we would just look at the all the pretty colors, sniff the pretty smells, and leave. But that’s not what happened. We entered the store and found an ice tray full of metals bowls with facial wash the texture of humus topped with food products like almonds, blueberries, and chocolate. Soon a young saleswoman clad in a funky black and white dress reminiscent of the fifties assaulted us, her black hair pulled loosely into a renegade ponytail, and her lips smothered in red lipstick. She berated us with peppy questions about our skin type while we stood trapped beside the humus-wash, the little woman between us and the door.  She seemed like exactly the kind of person you wanted as a friend to go out on the town with. She did not seem like the type of person you wanted to sell you humus-wash for your face. We thought we lost her after she finished telling us to try at least three different humus washes, but as we moved on to another section with shelves of color filled eyedroppers and make-up applicators, she appeared out of nowhere explaining that you could use this make-up on any part of your body for anything you wanted. Lip-color, eye-color, any location.  You name it.  She moved a sliding mirror in front of us, jumping around and commanding us to try them out, experiment, because they never come off! I saw my face in the mirror and mentioned the possibility that maybe I had gotten a sunburn while out running earlier. “You think?” the woman asked, ”I’ve got just the thing.” And she scurried away returning a few seconds later and spraying something on my face she claimed contained aloe vera. Except it didn’t so much spray, as it torpedoed directly at my forehead, leaving the sticky fluid to drip into my eyes. Apologizing profusely, the little woman scampered off to grab a bottle with a less defective sprayer on it, and squirted the magic elixir at my face five or so times. Each time I jumped at the cold shock of the substance harshly misting my face. Needless to say, as soon as the little woman left us for a moment, Morgan and I made a bee line out of the store, losing it as we made our way to the bathrooms to cleanse my face of the magic elixir, and meeting the female members of her ex-boyfriend’s family along the way. And now I know. This is why Lush is safer to enjoy from a distance.

This picture was not taken by me, but is the sort of humus-wash set-up that Morgan and I saw at Lush.