Weekend Memories

My mother started our girls' nights on Saturdays, which consisted of her drinking and hiding it from my father while she painted my nails, and we watch SNL and MAD TV while she trash talked my father and talked to me like I was an adult friend rather than a small child that was her daughter. That always stuck with me as a missed opportunity to bond with me and build a deep mother/daughter connection. These days my weekends consist of family game nights, movie nights and random fun. Tonight, my youngest daughter was feeling a little down because she was having friend drama. She needed mom time, so we got a notebook and a pen and went in the bedroom and played hangman and tic tac toe. We laughed so hard when it was her turn and the words she chose was "flibbertigibbet." I was struggling hard so her hint to me was, "an excessive talker." I was still so confused as to what it could be... needless to say I was hung and learned a new word. She is ten. It was hilarious to me and somewhere deep in my mind I thought about me at ten and mentally started comparing. I was sobering my mom up and trying so hard to keep her from doing things like drinking and driving etc. Here my daughter is adding to my vocabulary while I am adding to her good memories of her time with her mama. She also googled the word to throw me off, which in turn taught her a new word as well. Both fun and educational for both of us. I love to hear my children laugh. I love that all it takes is a piece of paper, a pen and some imagination and memories are made. It wasn't long after we began playing that the others heard us laughing and made their way into the bedroom and began playing too. In no time we were all piled into one room, screaming out random letters, laughing and trash talking each other (in a playful and competitive way.) And I was in my happy place. No phones, no computers, no TV's. No arguing, no anger, no drinking. Just genuine fun with the simplest game. Eventually that turned into a tic tac toe battle. Shortly after that the trick to the game was revealed by observation of my loudmouth teenage son and as he would say, "He sold." LOL. You know the tic tac toe trick... the one where you tag the middle and if the other person doesn't block you, you tag the top two or bottom two corners and that way no matter which way they block you, you have another option to still get three in a row. Anyways, that turned into a race to be the first one to tag a square to start that set up and we were all laughing again so hard. It ended with me tattooing a tic tac toe board with three hearts (my tag) in a row with a line through it that said "MOM WON" on my youngest daughter's forehead with an ink pen. It was hilarious. It is hard to think back to what my weekends looked like with my mom, but it is amazing experiencing the weekends I have now with my own children and knowing that they will indeed have funny and crazy stories to tell their children one day about their mama. But they will all be funny, happy, silly and great memories to share. The only trauma that happened here tonight was my daughter passing gas so loud and so smelly that it startled all of us and then her laughing so hard because we began picking on her that she almost tinkled herself. I call that a successful Friday night and one for the books. You can buy your kids the nicest things and you can give them everything they ask for, but I sincerely promise you it is the simplest, smallest things that you do with them when spending quality one on one time together that they will remember the most. In 10-20 years, they won't remember the $150.00 Jordans that you got them. They won't remember the Hollister jeans and the phone they had at 11 or 14 or even 17. But you make them laugh so hard they almost tinkle themselves and you sit down and play a board game or card game or do anything with them one on one where all of your Also, you're welcome for the new word in your vocabulary...Flibbertigibbet. One to remember on Scrabble night. -Feisty Mommy