strange but true

We visited several colleges in April with my two eldest children. They got a taste of dorm life at each school where they stayed with student hosts. One of these friendly students offered the following observation about going to college: "You don't really know how weird your family is until you go to college."

Hmmm. My children swear they already know "how weird" their family is, so I challenged them for a few examples of our idiosyncrasies. It took them no time at all to come up with the following list.

1. We are vegetarian.

2. We love to make fun of people. According to my children, the main topic of conversation at our house is other people, particularly how oddly they speak. . . . .

3, We have too many cats. Less than the plagues of Egypt, more than the Trinity, less than the ungrateful lepers, more than the number of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. . . .

4. We have the largest costume wardrobe outside the Metropolitan Opera House. And we dress in costume often.

5. We do not watch TV.

6. We not only do not have cellphones (Dad has one for work), we do not answer our telephone.

7. We never buy anything new. All our clothes, cars, bicycles, snowboards, etc. are purchased second hand. . . unless they are salvaged from the garbage.

8. We are perpetually late.

9. We have a seemingly endless store of private jokes - probably owing to the number of people in our family.

10. Our conversation is liberally sprinkled with quotations from movies, books, songs, plays, and Adventures in Odyssey episodes. Some nights less than half the dialogue at the dinner table is original.

11. We always have other people's children in our home. Anywhere from 11 to 15 people is common at meals, although we only have 9 in our family. Half the time we can't remember who is over.

12. We only have one bathroom.

13. Various members of our family have obsessions with shoes, bicycles and hats (Well, it's really only one member of the family) so we have large collections of those items.

14. Most of the minor children in our home do not get dressed until after lunch. They have friends who adopt the local custom when they are staying at our house.


That's the short list, I'm told. I can't wait to hear what the kids discover when they actually get to college.