Exhibit D: The Ear Key

The original purpose of the ear key was to unlock bathroom doors.  In our house (with 3 bathrooms and 10 people) being locked out of the bathroom qualified as an emergency.  So my dad made this key and kept it on his key ring to be readily handy should anyone accidentally lock the bathroom door on their way out (this happened often because they are just those push button locks).  HOWEVER, somehow my dad developed a habit of using it to clean his ears. 
Imagine, if you can, having a fairly normal conversation with a fairly normal looking dude when he casually pulls THIS

ear key

 

out of his pocket and sticks it in his ear.  What would go through your head?  You can see what's going through his head.  I remember thinking maybe he was trying to unlock his brain.  Or turn it on to get it working. 



 I asked an ENT what they would say to a patient who did this.  He said he would advise against it.  He also verified there are no magic locks or brain ignitions in your ear.
If you happen to be at my house and you see this key lying around, try to use it only for it's designated purpose, opening bathrooms.  And whatever you do, don't use it to clean your teeth.

Exhibit L: The Garden

Slugweirta Life Lesson Number One:  IF you live in a home with a yard, then AT LEAST half of said yard should be dedicated to a vegetable garden.  Failure to do this (if you are one of the aforementioned children) will result in genetic testing.  Of course at least two of us would fail that test. 

                Slugweirta’s passion for gardening has a long familial history.  Some of my very first memories are of the vegetable garden.  Starting in February, we would all plant little seeds indoors in little biodegradable cups.  Then nurture them, water them, thin them until May when we could safely (usually) plant them. 

 

You can see here some of the little seedlings in our living room.  Luckily they are in focus, unlike Nana.

That first garden, which if I remember correctly (and I’m sure I do) was larger than our home.  So we grew everything.  Broccoli, squash, corn, carrots, sweet peas, potatoes you name it, we grew it.  Each bed had a plant assigned to it and each group of four beds had a child assigned to weeding it.  I hated weeding the garden, so every time I would kick up a gigantic fuss.  My favorite thing to do (because my nickname was Weed, remember) was to complain loudly about being forced to exterminate my own kind.  

                “Oh, you poor little weed.  I don’t want to murder you, but my mother’s making me.”

                I believe Slugweirta was prouder of that garden than she was of her Master’s degree.  If I picture my mother at that time in her life (really at any time in her life) she would be out in the garden, tilling.  My mom is not afraid to get her hands dirty.  Part of her passion, I am sure, is that this is a super cheap way to feed eight children fresh produce, and also teach them the value of child labor laws.  In that yard we also had an apricot tree, two cherry trees, a pear and an apple tree. 

                Every spring we would go to the local dairy and fill our pickup truck full of cow manure.  IF you do the shoveling yourself, they let you take as much cow poop as you want.  FOR FREE.  I well remember standing knee deep in manure and shoveling it into piles in our garden.  I’m pretty sure I smelled fabulous for days afterward.  

                Our other source of fertilizer was the compost pit.  The most despised chore at my house has always been taking out the compost.  At the very back of our yard was a giant hole we dug every spring.  Throughout the year we would fill it with kitchen scraps.  Trekking out to the back of the yard with a bucket of smelly scraps meant for the pit was a daily chore.  My biggest fear was falling in.  And becoming compost myself.  I still have nightmares about it.

                BUT who’s going to turn down free fertilizer?  Not my mother.

                In our next home, the garden was significantly smaller than the house.  Mostly because the house was slightly larger and the lot much smaller.  Slugweirta fixed this by turning random bits of yard into garden.  And compost pits.

                After that we moved to a house with a huge yard.  And went back to a more suitable home to garden ratio.  My mother still grows a giant vegetable garden.  She also grows several citrus trees indoors.  Although I've never seen one produce a single fruit.  Every time she purchases an avocado, she tries to grow an avocado tree from its pit.  To do this she pierces it with three toothpicks and suspends it in a jar of water in the window sill.  I'll bet there's one in her kitchen window sill at this very moment.  She's been doing this for thirty years and I've never seen one do more than sprout.  Most of them mold and have to be thrown out.

                Because of her dedication to gardening, I (and most of my siblings) have a passion for home grown veggies.  I love tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden.  Although I could do without the long keeper tomatoes, which Slugweirta keeps way past their prime, simply because they are supposedly “long-keepers”.  That doesn’t mean they are still edible when they start to turn black, Mom.

                In order to avoid genetic testing, all of the kids who have homes with a yard (currently 5 of us) also have vegetable gardens.  Although, I go to Lowe’s to buy my manure.  Don’t tell my mother.

Exhibit K: Summer School

The summers of your youth were filled with unfettered freedom, right?  You did a few chores, sure, but mostly you were playing baseball or at the pool or at some summer camp or water skiing.  I dreamed of water skiing.  Until I actually tried it when I was 24.  I couldn’t stand up, so I basically got a lake water enema.  Dreamy.  But most people dream of the idyllic liberty of their childhood summers.  Not me.                                   

Me, thrilled about summer.

                As soon as school let out for summer was when our lessons began.  Yep, school all summer long.  We were all taught an instrument.  A useful skill to be sure.  Slugweirta had a big black leather box of different random instruments.  Like maracas and tambourines.  She had several hand held drums and a few magnificent sets of xylophones.  And a random animal horn that we hit with a mallet.  I’m sure the noise we made could be heard for miles. 

                Next we practiced calligraphy.  That’s right, calligraphy.  Ink, quill, fancy flowers on letters, calligraphy.  In a world that largely communicates via text, this has become a lost art.

Standard Wedding Invite 2015

 

                We were required to memorize all our math facts up to twelve, we were tested with flash cards.  If we couldn’t do the whole deck in 3 minutes, we had to do extra worksheets.  Slugweirta also gave us math workbooks for the next grade, so we would be one grade level ahead at the start of the school year.  I’m not complaining, this has truly come in handy and is the one thing I wish I could pass on to my kids.   Well that and my astonishing cow bell skills.   However, they are very resistant.

                Lastly we had to give book reports.  One book a week.  When was the last time you read 12 books in a summer?  I love to read.  But required reading is something else.  Every Saturday we would go to the library and check out the books we were going to read.  The next Friday afternoon, we would get up and tell everyone about what we learned from our books.  If you couldn’t find an acceptable book, my mom or dad would assign you one.  Because of this, by the time I was thirteen, I had read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Series, Watership Down, Ender’s Game, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, The Bell Jar, To Kill a Mockingbird, Dune, Wuthering Heights, A Tale of Two Cities, Asimov’s Foundation and A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  I’ll let you guess which parent assigned which books.  As a side note, last week I took a Facebook quiz that claimed the BBC figures most Americans had read 6 books on their list of 100.  I have read 42 of them.  So at least I’m not an average American as defined by the BBC.  I guess my parents would be thrilled, not by the number of books, but by the fact that I can’t call myself normal.  One week, in an act of defiance (I was attempting to bore them into banning book reports (my fear of breaking the rules really thwarts my acts of rebellion)) I selected the A Encyclopedia.  Yes, I read the entire thing.  It took me two weeks.  No, they did not ban book reports.  It was worth a shot.

Exhibit J: Our Pets

The weirdest thing about our pets is the alarming number of them.  My parents probably spend more money on animal food than human food.  Mostly because they grow their human food.  Both my parents seem to have an uncontrollable urge to feed and house any living thing that needs it.  Luckily that includes humans.  If you need a roof over your head, they'll find space for you be you Homo Sapien or feline.  You may not care for your three roommates of various species, but you'll be warm and dry.  And dewormed.   
As long as I can recall we've had cats, a dog and a fish tank.  I think this started as an effort to teach the kids responsibility, but it soon became clear who was boss.  Grootie.  She belonged to my grandmother who lived with us.  Grandma K. had two cats, Faust and Grootie, both as black as midnight.  At that same time we also had a dog named Willie (a girl) and we acquired a cat which was named Arafel.  Yeah, I don't know where that name came from either.  I'm just glad they decided to name me after my grandmother.  And a tank full of goldfish.  4 kids + 3 adults + 3 cats + 1 dog + 5 fish.  16.  Easily the fewest number of creatures that have ever lived in my parents home at one time.  This is what I remember about those pets.  Grootie liked you if you pet her, otherwise she wanted nothing to do with you.  Willie had some puppies that she deserted somewhere and we never found (at least not that I know of).  One of the goldfish hopped out of the tank and dried to the wall while we were on a trip.  Arafel was the mother of many of our subsequent cats.  She had one litter under our shed where a skunk lived.  Bad choice.  She lost that fight and we had to wash baby kittens in tomato juice.  More than once I had to bottle feed baby kittens, it is not as cute as it sounds.

Ok, maybe it is.

From her first batch of kittens we all picked a kitten of our own.  Mine was a yellow tabby named Mustard.  The last cat I voluntarily owned.  Nana picked a black one with white paws named Mittens, who would claw your feet through the crack under her bedroom door if you got too close.  Beadle got two gray tabbies, Melanie and Stripes.  And Pooker got the calico, I can't remember its name.  After Willie we had a dog named Katrina.  She was part wolf.  We got the educational hamsters that I was meant to learn about the birds and the bees (and cannibalism) from.  Incidentally, we once left one in an exercise ball overnight, my mom woke up to weird sounds and assumed it was an intruder, she attacked it with a handy fencing foil she had nearby.
I decided I loved parakeets, I went through several.  Including one, a bright yellow bird named Goldenrod (in retrospect that's a bad name for anything, even a flower) that I took the phrase "if you love something let it go..etc"  to heart and freed him.  He never came back.  And it is unlikely he survived the Utah snows.  My favorite parakeet, Marbles, was eaten by an unnamed cat while we were in Payson one summer.  One parakeet got shut in the door, my mom tried to resuscitate him with CPR.  It didn't work.  Around this time Pooker had a turtle.  That Katrina tried to eat.  Unsuccessfully.  Still, he was never himself again after the attack.  The hamsters multiplied, the cats multiplied, the fish multiplied, and I remained blissfully oblivious to their methods. 
When Katrina died, after my dad took her off in the woods to return the earth (he always felt and still does that that is where they feel the most at home, and where they belong when they die (I'm not entirely sure about the legality of this, but he's never let that stop him.))  He has also, more than once, expressed a desire to be handled the same way when his time comes (I AM pretty sure about the legality of that.) We got two dogs, Jessie and Kaio.  I foolishly named Jessie after a girl at school who I really wanted to be friends with.  Somehow naming a dog after her did not have the flattering impact on her that I had imagined.  Weird.
Mika was my dad's first service dog, followed by Songka, who is still pretty new. 
About the time we got Mika we had many cats (probably more than 20) which my parents actively vaccinated and medicated and fed and fixed.  By this time I knew that meant they shouldn't still be multiplying.  We had a rescued iguana who was the meanest lizard I've ever met.  He was also five feet long.  And countless fish. 
Now there are fewer cats.  Like fifteen.  Most of them are half wild and will hiss if you come near.   Many are missing tails or are otherwise too mangy to be loveable.  Two dogs.  And an unnumbered amount of fish.  And six humans. 

This is what happens when your heart is too big to say no.  You end up deworming wild cats when you meet your son-in-law to be for the first time.   Also, some people may begin to suspect that you may be too mangy to be loveable.