"Her daddy wrestles alligators, mama works on carburetors, brother is a fine mediator...for the president"

An explanation. 1) These posts will be about my Christmas vacation. 2) I have all these random lyrics that I would love to work into conversation sometime, but since that will never happen, I will use them as titles instead. 3) Amanda 2 used to send me lyrics when we worked at the Girl Scouts and have me guess what song they were from. I would usually cheat and google them, but she thought I was super smart. I will let you guess, and at the end of the post reveal the song title and artist. No, this is not a gimmick. I'm just bored with blogging. 4) All the lyrics will be in some way related to the subject of the post. This post is about my family. 5) I'm really sick of the timeline and listing format of recounting various events, so I'm going to try to tell about my Christmas break categorized by topic. (Ironic that my note about being sick of lists is in a list, isn't it?)

Ok, so my family. First of all, let's start with the immediate family. My mom and dad are crazy. At one point my dad began randomly saying "Nacho cheese" repeatedly for no reason at all except for the fact that he thought it was really funny. After about the 5th time of him saying it and laughing, my mom a la the Cheez It commercial pretended to check off a list and said "Not Ready." My dad also recently bought an Indiana Jones-esque hat which he thinks is really cool.

Now to my extended family. The most awkward moment came courtesy of my gramma. Late on Christmas morning, she asks my dad "Did you go see your dad already?" My mom, dad, and I all kinda of stare at her in awkward horror until my mom says "uh...he died in February." Painful.

The cousins. My cousin in-law Heidi decided to institute a "boob grabbing" goodbye. So after you hug to say goodbye, you then are required to grab the other person's boob. As much as I wanted to resist this new policy, after you have your breast grabbed a couple times, it's really hard not to reciprocate. Also on that side of the family is Heidi's daughter Aubrey, Aubrey was playing around with my smart phone by changing the settings and stuff. One setting she had on it, made it so that the last text message I received was extremely large on the front page. It just so happened that my last text message had been from Danielle. Yeah. Aubrey took one look at it and said "maybe we should try another setting." Aubrey's sister is Molly. Molly is 18 and brought her boyfriend, Meade, to Christmas dinner. When I asked "Mead? Like the fermented honey beverage?" No one had any clue what I was talking about. Was I the only one forced to read Beowulf in high school? DJ is Aubrey and Molly's brother. His place marker on the dinner table looked like it said "PJ" and so he was referred to as "Potty John" for the rest of the evening because that is super funny to middle school kids.

Now to the ex-con side of the family. Considering this was the first holiday in about 5 years that none of them were in jail, things were pretty uneventful. Dezerae left for most of Christmas, so we only saw her for maybe a half hour. Savon, Dezerae's half brother apparently ran away to pout just after Christmas dinner, but no one realized it for about an hour and by that time he had come back. (He's in like 6th grade, so it's not that big of a thing). Dezerae's mom felt the need to divulge odd family secrets which was also pretty awkward. And apparently at one time, according to her, I had imaginary friends named Foxy and Fancy (not that that's a family secret).

Now to the normal though abnormally large portion of the family. Patrick, the one who thought a roadtrip would be an awesome idea (please refer to THIS post), continued to make fun of the road trip idea for most of the time I saw him and even posted fake route suggestions on my facebook like this:

I appreciate that he sees the utter ridiculousness in this suggestion. We also shared the road trip thing with Molly (the previously mentioned 18 year old) who responded "Why do I feel like Dezerae would get arrested?" I'm glad to see that the utter ridiculousness of Dezerae permeates all factions and age levels of my family. We also played a game of "pass Logan". Logan is my cousin that's in 5th grade and people were basically carrying him around, and you had to pass him to someone who hadn't had him yet. I discovered that I can get out of being subjected to this game by carrying around a glass of red wine. Hmmm...which would I rather be carrying? a 10 year old child or booze...tough choice.

That's pretty much a sampling of my family in a nutshell. The lyric was from "Meet Virginia" by Train. My dad regularly tries to sing this song as "Hey Virginia" or "Oh Virginia."