My friend JoHanna invited me to come over while most of the rest of her family were gone at a conference. I was excited about it, and had a good time. JoHanna is my friend Cassandra’s sister; Cassandra wasn’t there because she was one of the ones at the conference. Their youngest brother Micaiah is friends with Caleb, and he invited him to come over too.
When I was younger, I thought it would be fun to sleep over at a friend’s house, but it never happened; I have never slept over at anyone’s house but relatives, till now.
When we got there, JoHanna and I talked about garden stuff, and went out to see her garden–she’s growing a vegetable garden, and we both like to see things grow and produce. She probably enjoys it even more than I do, but sometimes I have tips to pass along which I heard from my dad, mom, or someone else with a green thumb.
After supper I worked on scrapbooking while she worked on a project of her own. I was surprised and happy to discover that we were both able to get stuff done, and talk at the same time. I have a hard time multi-tasking; also, I am always so wishy-washy that I have trouble figuring out how I’m going to do it. But this time, I was not plagued by indecision so badly. I felt like going, “WOO-HOO! I am finally scrapbooking the photos I’ve taken! Now that I’ve finally started again, I’m going to do ALL of the photos I ever took!!” Ha. (All 3,568,834,201…. of them 
)
Elizabeth, JoHanna’s younger sister who was also home, was in the same room the whole time, so we were a threesome. I played music from our music collection on my laptop on random shuffle, and both she and JoHanna seemed to appreciate the songs. “I never listen to music, really. Well, not very often,” Elizabeth said. “I like your music better than ours!”
She would remark on the songs sometimes–usually, “I like this one!” (and bobbing to it, or making a funny remark: one song started out dramatically, “In the Beginning….” and she quipped, “….was the End!”) but occasionally, “This doesn’t sound good…” or “Too slow and boring” (I agreed with her, in that case!) We have a pretty nice collection, because there are so many different people in our family who have bought so many different styles of music, that each song that plays is something uniquely different from the previous one.
There were some times we all had a good laugh together. There was an elusive bad smell in their (spotless) house, which we couldn’t figure out the source of. Was it perhaps a diaper in the bathroom? Nope. Was it the garbage in the kitchen? Nope. It seemed to be coming out from the floor. After much investigation, JoHanna was pretty sure it was coming from garbage in the garage.
Elizabeth couldn’t stop commenting on it–”That STINK! Oh, I don’t like that stink!”
I teased her, “Really? We all love stink!”
Pretty soon Elizabeth was making both herself and JoHanna laugh by how many times she’d impulsively exclaim about the smell. (which really didn’t seem that bad, to me.)
JoHanna said the smell didn’t seem to be coming from outside, but hey, we could send Caleb and Micaiah outside searching for it, in case!
Either Elizabeth or JoHanna said, “They’ll ask, ‘What did you do at the ____’s house?’ and they’ll reply, ‘Oh, we went searching for a stink!’” They both laughed.
Immediately, I could hear in my head what Evan, Justin, or Owen would reply to that. “Yeah, and I know what they’d reply,” I said. In a deadpan, matter-of-fact voice: “‘And then you found out it was you!’”
They both burst out laughing. I could imagine my brothers saying that in an off-hand way, more of an automatic tease than a joke; but for Elizabeth and JoHanna, it hit them like the punch line of a joke.
I could almost see Elizabeth imagining it in her head; as she repeated it in her own words, and laughed some more, and we all laughed. I felt like I had just transferred a joke out of my brother’s minds to them. I thought that they should spend some time around Evan, when he’s in the right mood; they’d probably find him hilarious.
In another instance, we were talking about how weird the word IHIP is. JoHanna said to get some sort of teacher discount on products, her mom had to show an IHIP, and Elizabeth remarked, “IHIP! What a weird word!”
It suddenly popped into my head what it stood for, and I said “Individual Home Instruction Plan. But I know, it is a weird word. It’s like–rose-hip, eye-hip!”
Unexpected to me, they both laughed, though I don’t think Elizabeth had ever even heard of rosehips. (I asked her if she knew what a rosehip was, and she said no. In fact, I don’t really either , but I told her I thought it was some plant–I am not sure if it’s related to a rose at all or not–that is often an ingredient in herbal teas).
I explained how my mind always makes associations between words like that. The name “Melanie” always makes me think of “melanin”, for example. Elizabeth told me about a guy named Benji, and how the name seemed weird to her. “See now, that makes me think of Bungee cord!” I said, and she laughed -”Bungee cord!”
And in another instance, JoHanna had asked for my advice on how to improve a card she had just made. I suggested a line around the edges to bring it all together, out of a color she already used. She asked me to make the line, so I did, and when she said “That looks really nice!” Elizabeth said “What?”, wanting to see what I did too. So JoHanna turned the card for her to see.
Elizabeth craned her neck out, open-mouthed, looking at it with the funniest, exaggerated and yet genuine, expression of puzzlement on her face, asking “What’s different?” We laughed at her expression, and Elizabeth laughed too when I imitated it.
JoHanna explained the new thing was the line around it, and Elizabeth recovered from her all-encompassing bewilderment; she said “Oh yeah, that does look good.” To me she explained, “I thought you were writing a letter in it!” (like a letter to someone–she thought when I was drawing the border line for JoHanna, that I was writing short little letter to someone in it. (Little does she know, my letters are never short!! 
)
Elizabeth asked if she could look at the scrapbooking pages I already did. Just about all of the few pages in there, I had worked on over at their place, so she kept saying, “Oh, I remember you working on that one!” I felt a bit sheepish–so many were unfinished. She was most fascinated by the first page spread in there that I had done of their first visit over here, in 2002.
Everyone looked a lot different; Deirdre was only a baby, Elizabeth looked very small, and when she saw the picture of Micaiah and Caleb, she said, “That’s Micaiah and–? Oh, that’s Micaiah and Caleb! Oh, Caleb’ so CUTE!! Aww he’s so cute! Hey Caleb, that’s you, look at how cute you were!”
(I was pleased she could appreciate it, as most people just don’t have the proper appreciation if I show them photos and say, “Hey, isn’t is weird, look how different so-and-so looks!” )
“I wonder how old I was?” Elizabeth pondered, as she continued to look at it, and we figured out she was seven, which we figured out out was eight years ago. “Wowwwww,” she and JoHanna said.
Some family photos had been stuck in the book, though I hadn’t done anything with them yet. In one of them, Justin was the baby. She said, “That looks just like Justin! I mean I don’t know, just even even though he’s a baby it still looks just like Justin.” I knew exactly what she meant.
In some photos I had (another unfinished spread) of us posing in our uncle’s convertible, quite a while ago, she looked closely and asked, “Is that Rundy?” pointing to the oldest kid.
“Yep!” I said. “That’s funny that you can tell, because three of my younger siblings looked at it and asked, ‘Is that Collin?’”
“Well, yeah, I thought it looked like him too, but then I looked at it and I could tell it was Rundy.”
We watched a movie after that. JoHanna thoughtfully let me decide which one, bringing a stack for me to look through. Elizabeth had mercy on me in my indecision and helped narrow it down to three choices, after saying “Oh, that one’s good!” about every single one.
Then it was late–bedtime. Not exactly settling down time, though. Micaiah tried to tickle Caleb (and was disappointed, as always; Caleb isn’t ticklish), so Caleb retaliated and tickled back; he practically only had to touch him, and Micaiah was helpless with laughter. Elizabeth somehow managed to join into the laughter and goofing too.
Then I heard a lot of whumping, bumping, and giggling while I was in the bathroom getting ready for bed. When I came out, Caleb was standing over Micaiah who was on the couch; he was hitting him repeatedly with a pillow, and Micaiah was giggling hysterically. Not my idea of fun, but Micaiah was having SO much fun, maybe the poor guy needs to be hit with a pillow more often 
They were told to settle down, as, after all, it was ONLY 11:00 as JoHanna laughingly said. Micaiah gave a happy sigh and said “That was fun.”
“Yeah,” Caleb sighed back. “Especially the part where I won.”
Once we went to bed, we wound up talking. Why is it that it’s easier to talk late at night, when the lights are out? I felt incredibly tired, but I ignored it, because such a time as this only comes once in a blue moon. After we stopped talking sometime past midnight, she shortly fell asleep (she told me so the next day). But I had gotten myself all wound up, and laid awake for two hours!
The next day it seemed like us talking the night before hadn’t actually occurred at all. I could remember the things I said, yet still it felt like it hadn’t ever happened. I think it was because of a combination of me being so tired at the time, talking to her before falling asleep being such an unusual thing, and the fact that I laid awake thinking things for so long afterward.
This was kind of funny: At some point in the night, probably not long after I had fallen asleep, I woke up because JoHanna had rustled in her bed–she may have sat up in bed. She said some gibberish word, which my sleep-fogged brain interpreted as her asking me a question. I seem to remember that she said something like “bihboopa?”, but I can’t really remember, so maybe I just made that up. I heard myself reply, “Hmmm?” and I thought she made an amused sound. Did she think it was funny that I replied to her question in such a sleepy way?-my brain wondered, before drifting right back to sleep.
The next day, I recalled the little incident, and asked her if she remembered any of it. She laughed and said no, but she often talks in her sleep. I’m sure she’s heard from Cassandra about it plenty of times before!
The next day, Elizabeth and I kept having a dispute about a pencil. Okay, not really a dispute (I couldn’t figure out how else to put it), but it was a kind of funny back-and-forth that continued for a while. I kept taking her pencil whenever I needed to use one, and then forgetting to return it–she was only using it occasionally. Every time she needed it, she’d say “Where’s my pencil?” and I’d say, “Oh, I think I stole it.”
It kept going on like this, till she started saying, “Penncillll, Cadie!” whenever she needed it.Even when I was actually innocent.
When I left, JoHanna said we should hide her pencils (to continue the joke), but Elizabeth came into the room and asked, “What?”, so she didn’t.
Almost all of them in their family like practical jokes, and while we were taking a walk, JoHanna was telling me about various ones they had done (mostly April Fool’s jokes). The recent instances were when Matthias walked up to Elizabeth and smeared some type of food all over her face, and when Matthias called them pretending to be someone else, and asked “Is your refrigerator running?” They had just had a new refrigerator delivered, and didn’t recognize his voice since he made it sound deeper. So they said, “Yeah! Yeah, it’s running!” to which Matthias dead-panned, “Then you’d better go run after it.”
Elizabeth likes jokes of all types. She laughed when I recounted the above stories to Caleb, and she laughed when Caleb did a trick on me that he learned from them. She also tried one on me. “Hey Cadie, do you want to take the stupid person test? Okay, what color is the sky? What color is the ground? What color is a tree?”, etc. Then she asked, “What’s the first question I asked?”
I found that I couldn’t remember. I remembered she asked me what color is the sky, but I thought there was something before that. Since I couldn’t remember, I just told her the literal truth: “The first question you asked is if I wanted to take the stupid person test,” and of course I realized as I said it that I had foiled her plot. “Rats!” she said.
And when I was working on scrapbooking, she suddenly said, seriously, “Cadie, stop it.” I did a double-take. I looked at her. “Stop it, Cadie. Just stop it,” she repeated.
“Stop what?” I asked. And she laughed and said she got me. She tried it on Caleb, and got the same reaction. I could almost see him doing a double-take in the pause before he asked stop what.
Even though there was no reason why Elizabeth would have said it in seriousness, the serious tone of voice (not very common with her) made me feel like I really had done something that displeased her. I tried (unsuccessfully) to dead-pan back at her later, saying in an attempted serious voice: “I’m going to get you for that, Elizabeth.”
“Okay!” she replied happily.
And so on. We played more music, I did more scrapbooking, JoHanna did more cards and worked on the folksy craft things she was sewing, Elizabeth did more coloring, and then before I knew it we had to go.
When Caleb and I left, we were being melodramatic, pretending this was the last time we’d ever see them.
“We’ll never forget you!” I said.
Caleb assumed a mournful aspect. “I’ll never see you again, Micaiah!” He gave Micaiah a handshake, with some fake crying, and then pretended to blow his nose loudly on Micaiah’s shirt. He did it in such a way that it looked hilarious, and cracked us all up. That was the last laugh for the visit!
