Last night was the family birthday party for me. We’d had to postpone it because of my brother’s travel schedule for work (Paris, Belgium and Amsterdam in five days – tough, but enviable). Getting this thing to come together was a pain.

My sister-in-law is being an idiot these days. She gets this know-it-all attitude and the rest of us just want to run screaming in the other direction. We were doing Chinese take-out and she had a problem with my mother wanting the orders ahead of time. Cripes, it’s my mother’s house and my mother’s choice, not hers!

Of course Matilda and Keith make the evening fun, so I try to put everything else aside and enjoy them. Keith is appalled that I have yet to read any of the Harry Potter books, so I promised that I’d get to them this week. He wants to be able to talk about them with me and I’m failing him here.

Matilda was in her usual rare form. My brothers get a kick out of telling her all the rotten stories they can think of that have to do with me, thereby creating urban legends. Once Matilda hears a family story she wants to hear all the details over and over again. She knows the stories by heart, but she continues to want to hear them from us. The family thinks that she is so much like me (drama queen/diva) that they feel obliged to tell her all the stuff I did as a kid.

Well tonight I decided to turn the tables and tell stories about my brothers. This came about because Keith was complaining that his father keeps bugging him to clean his room. I almost choked on my chicken! He was one of the biggest slobs you’d ever want to meet when he was a kid! (I think he still is but has the wife to clean up after him.)

I felt that this was the golden opportunity to tell about the nun he had when he was in third grade. Now granted, she was off the beam and a bit on the mean side, but I think she had some justification in getting upset when she had him clean out his desk and discovered a pair of dirty socks!

This made Keith’s day.

I felt that my other brother shouldn’t be made to seem saintly so I then spilled the beans about how he constantly tried to skip school when he was in the first grade. He’d hide on the front porch and my mother wouldn’t realize he was there until the school called. She would then march him back to school. Matilda loved this one.

This led to discussions about how strange some of the nuns were. (My brothers only went to parochial school through third grade, I was parochial kindergarten through high school and then went on to B.C. which is a Jesuit school.) I told the story about my seventh grade nun who literally had a nervous breakdown in front of the class. A kid dropped a ruler and that put her over the edge. She stormed around the room and threw all of our books and things that were on our desks on the floor. Then she started seeing flowers on the wall.

Matilda: "Then what happened?"

Me: "The ambulance came and they took her to the hospital."

Matilda: "And then did you paaaarrtttyyyy? Paaarrttyyy? (Making that stirring motion that the kids use when they dance.)

I howled. I practically had cake pouring out of my nose. She is in first grade and she’s already thinking this way??? She is going to be a terror when she hits the teenage years!

My family gifts were all money, except for the worry box I got from my mother. It is a box covered with a white brocade fabric and inside it are three very delicate blown glass angels sitting on cotton so it looks as if they are on a cloud. One is holding a book, one is praying, and one had a candle. They have gold halos and gold tipped wings. This verse is on the inside cover of the box:

Isn’t that lovely? It makes me cry when I read it.