having fun upstairs, downstairs, and in my lady's chamber

Now Playing: Brother2, who's bouncing a foam ball against his bedroom door while he's supposed to be doing his schoolwork

This post concerns the CY game night held at Mr. and Mrs. Y's house last Saturday, December 17, from 7:00 to 10:00 in the evening. Here goes....

After supper, Ross and Brother1 drove down to the Ys' home, which is only a few houses down from ours. The Ys moved in last week. Ross and Brother1 took along a couple of pans of chocolate-chip-and-butterscotch cookies that I'd baked in a flurry before supper. Peter, Daisy, Andrew, Brother2, and I walked (or ran, as the case may be).

The party was already well underway when we arrived. Everyone was eating cookies and popcorn and lounging around in the den at the bottom floor of the Ys' house. Mrs. Y was busy trying to finish setting out all the food, so she gave Joseph, her baby son, to me to hold. I held him awkwardly on my hip while SwanElf teased me about holding him. I finally gave him to her to hold. She settled herself in an overstuffed rocking chair with a placid smile on her face and the baby cuddled against her chest. People were still arriving. I gave Meri her birthday present: she turned seventeen today! She and Princess watched the fun from the stairs until Mr. Y organized us into two games: a game of Taboo, in the den, and a game of balderdash in the living room. Mr. Y handed children's books to everyone to use as writing desks. Marigold, Meri, Daisy, and Betty busily flipped through the Disney retellings of fairy tales, giggling the while. Sadly, the Ys couldn't locate their dictionary, so Daisy had to run back to our house to pick up the second volume of our weighty Webster's set (the second volume because the X, Y, and Z words are all the most interesting ones in the dictionary, of course). Until she returned, Peter used the Ys' little Roget's dictionary/thesaurus. The first word he picked was "fortuitous". Ross, Henry, and I all knew what it meant. Ross and Henry wrote down fake definitions, but I sat and looked sheepish, refusing to write down anything, while everyone made fun of me for knowing the word. "You're an English major! You know everything!" was the oft-repeated refrain. Ross read books to Raychel, the Ys' almost two-year-old daughter.

Eventually, I picked myself up and went down to the den to join Taboo, which was just getting started after a hunt to retrieve the Taboo set from a box. Boromir sat on the stairs and watched, munching peanut butter popcorn. The boys (Mr. Y, Ross, Brother1, Daniel) were on one team, and the girls (Violin, SwanElf, Hannah, and I) were on the other team. We had a delightfully uproarious game. Ross had been rather taciturn the whole time my cousins had been here, but he became quite jovial as the night progressed. Violin and SwanElf made fun of the boys' attempts to win the game. Someone decreed that the "hot seat" for the girls' team was a leather-upholstered rocking chair, while the "hot seat" for the boys' team was a sway-backed, orange sofa. Violin perched on the sofa's arm with the "buzzer" (which Mr. Y pretended to use as a razor, as a joke) to buzz the boys' reader whenever he said a taboo word. The tactics used by the reader to get his or her teammates to guess the word were quite hilarious. Ross used "the thing on the flag that the weirdos carry in the student parade" to try to get people to guess "rainbow" (the emblem of the Diversity Tribe). He also used Beevo, the emblem of the college that rivals his, to get people to guess "steer"--fortuitously for him, Brother1 recognized the name, though no one else in the room except the three of us knew what it meant. I tried to use it myself later on "meatloaf", but none of the girls had caught the reference from earlier. Mrs. Y sat and watched. Shadow crouched next to Raychel on the stairs, observing the fun. Raychel assiduously munched a bag full of potato chips, scattering fragments, Gretel-like, wherever she went.

Meanwhile, Shadow and his siblings arrived. He and his brother set up a Nintendo game set on the Ys’ television across the den from our Taboo game. Daniel and Boromir were soon glued to the TV. After the girls' Taboo team beat the boys' team, Ruth, Marigold, Peter, and Shadow joined us for another round, in which the other team (Violin, SwanElf, Ross, Brother1, etc.) won. I prowled upstairs to see what was going on in the living room. Princess and Marigold had brought out Cranium, and everyone was laughing and sitting around a blue card table. Brioni hovered nearby, holding Joseph, and smiling shyly at the fun.

Back downstairs, I slouched on the orange couch. The noise and laughter was becoming rather too much for me. Though Taboo and Cranium are not noisy games, everyone was so excited that they were all shouting. Mrs. Y rocked placidly in the midst of it all. Raychel clambered up onto the sofa beside me, dragging behind her a little plastic toy eggbeater, with one of Mrs. Y's old blue hats jammed onto her head. When Raychel discovered that if she drilled the eggbeater on my hand, I made a horrific howling sound, she grinned broadly. She drilled my hand for awhile, then my hair, and up and down my arms, chuckling evilly as I howled in mock pain. "Do you just enjoy hurting people?" I whimpered. "Yes," she lisped nonchalantly. She yanked the blue hat down over my eyes and drilled the eggbeater on my head, which made me hoot in pretend agony. Brother2, watching the Nintendo games, bounced up and down on a huge purple exercise ball and read "Fox in Socks" out loud to anyone who would listen. The ridiculous Dr. Seuss rhymes, and the crazy animals that looked as though they'd stepped out of a three-year-old's scribblings, mirrored the carefree, barely-contained joviality of the evening.

The Taboo game evaporated after awhile, as did the game of Cranium. In the living room, Brother1 and Meri organized a game of Mafia. Violin sat beside Mrs. Y in the den and gave her a long, complicated description of children's speech development patterns. Like Fric, she thinks with her hands--she used rapid gestures to supplement her "lecture". Raychel, the blue hat bobbing against her eyebrows, played with Ruth.

It was getting late. Mrs. Y took the little ones upstairs to bed, and Mr. Y sat on the stairs, guarding the bedrooms. Meri and Brother1 put together a game of sardines. Brother2 bounced his fist over outstretched hands as he counted, "Eeny, meeny, miney, mo, catch a tiger by the toe, if he hollers, let him go, eeny, meeny, miney, mo; my mother told me to choose the very best one and you are it!" Boromir was the first one chosen to hide. Mr. and Mrs. Y courteously turned off most of the lights in the house. Princess, Marigold, Hannah, Violin, SwanElf, and Ruth had to leave, and for awhile the entry area was a mess as Marigold tried to find her missing shoe from the sea of shoes stacked by the door. I waved them off, my breath hanging mistily in the dank air, shimmering like chain-mail mesh.

When I stepped indoors, I heard a great deal of giggling emanating from the guest room, just off the entry area. I stepped inside and found that everyone was jammed into the closet, including Boromir, who, suiting his small stature, had wedged himself on one of the shelves. Peter was the first to find him (my cousins are experts at hiding on shelves--when we play sardines in their house, shelves and cabinets are always the first places to be checked because that's where they hide--you even have to fumble along the topmost shelves of the closet, because Peter and Andrew can climb like monkeys), so Peter was the next to hide. Everyone gathered in the den and stood around, counting loudly, while Peter hid. Then we all separated to look for him. Estella and I groped into the Ys' garage and poked around inside the car. Henry checked the laundry room. Sam and Boromir looked under the computer desk in the study, while Brioni wandered around, smiling mysteriously and giving us the hint that "Whoever hid wasn't very original." It didn't take me long to figure out where Peter must've gone: back to the closet. I crouched in the corner behind the door. Pretty soon, everyone else except Henry had secreted themselves in some nook or cranny of the guest bedroom. We waited and waited, huffing and giggling in the dark. My legs grew cramped. Brother1, lurking in the wardrobe, finally shouted, "Henry! We're NOT in the guest bedroom! Nope! There's no one in here!". We all laughed loudly, which, of course, produced the desired effect: Henry appeared, blinking at us blankly as we streamed past him to the den. Meri was the next to hide. Estella and I looked everywhere for her. I couldn't figure out why all the boys were hanging around Mr. Y's computer: Ross was even sitting in the chair, messing with the screensaver. At last, they started to laugh at us, and we realized that Meri was hiding under the desk.

"Ok, guys! Load up! Time to go home!" I declared. "Oh, just one more round!" Ross begged, but I insisted. I hated to leave the Ys' new house in such a mess, but considering that all the lights were off and that Mrs. Y seemed to be in bed, there wasn't much use in fishing around for the vacuum cleaner. I sent Peter, Andrew, Daisy, and Brother2 scuttling down the street, while Brother1 and Ross drove. I realized that the knife that had gone with the cookies could be missing, so I ran back to see if I could find it. Meri, Estella, Betty, Sam, and Boromir were having their midnight snack in the dining room--leftover sandwiches and chips. I sprinted home, my shadow wavering on blue mist as a passing car's headlights illuminated the foggy night.