I don't know if I care enough to choose a title right now.

Theres one thing I really hate about living in this family.

What I hate, is the fact that even though my two younger sisters and I cause a FRACTION of the problems around here, we are ALWAYS the ones who get lectured about the changes that need to be made. The changes that WE need to make, the problems WE cause in this house.

Its simply amazing, it never fails to happen. The house gets a little out of control, and lets wrangle up the girls and yell at them. Good idea.

It happened again tonight. We’d had a pretty stressful day, everyone was home except for Seth and Dad, and we were trying to get back into the ‘schoolwork’ swing after the holidays. Mom told me the other day that she’d wanted to review some of my work so we could choose a time for me to begin my testing, and she said that she wanted to do it today, but we never got around to it. She started with the youngest kids, and then spent a couple of hours with Laura and Emily, and I sat by the fireplace reviewing and testing myself.

It really wasn’t any different then its always been before, but I’m the one whos supposed to be done in six months. I’m the one who is running out of time, and it is just getting a little annoying. But you know, Niles penmanship is much more important then making sure I have all my science and math done, oh to be sure.

I’m not trying to have a pity party here, so I’m sorry if it sounds like one.

Back to the point though, it had been a ‘tense’ day to say the least. Almost everyone was crabby, everyone was loud, everyone wanted the attention. And almost everything went wrong.

When Erik wanted to play his favorite song on the piano (He plays it incessantly, but most of us just try to ignore it.) Laura yelled at him and told him to quit playing for just 10 minutes, so then Mom yelled at her and told her to let him play, and LAURA being the genius that she is, yelled some idiotic thing in rebuttal that just frustrated Mom more. When mom tried to get Sophia down for a nap, Emily and I couldn’t get Laura and the boys to shut up. When Sophia woke up from her nap she screamed her head off (we still don’t know why.) for about 15 minutes until I went into her room and talked to her. And when the girls and I were cleaning the kitchen after supper, we started joking around, and apparently it was ‘too loud and absolute nonsense’ even though it made perfect sense to the girls and I (Most people don’t understand us when we speak and its just the three of us. Apparently we know each other so well that we can leave out key subjects and phrases and it doesn’t effect us in the least.), so we got called in for a ‘talk’.

Its more like a ‘yell’. Mom yells, Dad lecturers, Laura mouths off (Thanks Laura!) and makes things worse, Emily gets depressed, I try and listen and keep my mouth shut, and speak when I have something that I feel is important to say…but tonight I just stared off into space.

I really didn’t care at the moment. I didn’t want to try harder to make things work around here, we always have these ‘talks’ and nothing ever changes. Its just so hard living with this many minds and bodies, especially when so many of them are young. I know I will try harder, I know we all will. That’s what we’ve been doing for the last few years now, we try, and we’ve stayed above water…but honestly I’m getting a little tired of treading water and holding life afloat.

We returned to the kitchen, I grabbed the mop and Emily headed over to the sink.

She started to cry.

It broke my heart to see that, I knew exactly how she was feeling. All three of us knew how the others were feeling, but we all deal with it in different ways. Laura gets frustrated, I try and think of what we can do to make things different…and Emily, she gets discouraged.

She started to fill the sink with soap and water, and I set the mop against the well. As I walked towards her she turned her head and her face looked so young, and all I could do was hug the girl. We hugged and she cried on me and I made little jokes about the whole thing until she started laughing.

Heres our plan. Since the parents don’t appreciate our humor when it gets a little crazy, we’ve decided to compare it to ‘being Jewish’. We can’t change our humor, nor do we want to, just as the Jews didn’t want to change their race. So Mom and Dad are the ‘Gestapo’ and every time we start getting crazy in their presence the first girl who notices will say “We’re getting a little Jewish.” And we’ll try to calm down until we’re alone again.

So that’s our plan. A little dramatic you might say, but that’s us. As long as we can make it through a couple more years I’m cool with it.