Dead fish and lemon juice

Karen's sister Linda is in town—she'll be working the book buy-back at BYU—and she spent the night last night. Rachel and Miriam took to her almost immediately when the blow-up bed was set up, demanding that she "Watch this!" while executing various leaps and jumps onto the bed. Later Rachel took Aunt Linda into her bedroom so they could have some girl talk. While they were in there, Linda was trying to encourage Rachel to clean up a bit since her room was so incredibly messy.

At one point Rachel attempted to climb up the dresser in order to place something on top.

"Oh, don't do that, Rachel," Linda said. "It could fall on top of you!"

"Like the fish tank?" Rachel asked, obediently getting down.

"How do you know about that?!" Linda asked.

"My grandma told me that story. She remembered it all the way from when she was a little girl. I don't know how.... She can't remember anything now."


Once upon a time, see, Karen and Linda shared a room. On top of their dresser was a fish tank. Inside that fish tank lived some fish. Obviously.

Linda was little and wanted to see the fish, so she climbed up the dresser to get a closer look at the fish. With too much weight on its front, the dresser had no choice but to topple over on top of Linda (after putting up a valiant fight to stay upright, I'm sure). The fish tank broke and killed everything in its wake.

Except for Linda (thank goodness).

Karen has never forgotten this incident because she was slightly furious that her little sister had killed all of her pet fish to one go.

Linda has never forgotten this incident because (hello!) a dresser fell on top of her. It's a little traumatic when large pieces of furniture fall on top of you.

This story was shared with Rachel because she has a nasty habit of climbing up her dresser.

Eventually we managed to peel the girls away from Linda long enough to get them clad in pyjamas and into bed. We planned to play games after they fell asleep and while we waited Andrew did homework. After an hour of silence we decided it was probably safe to begin the festivities, part of which was making raspberry lemonade (Karen picked up a huge box of frozen raspberries at the distribution center. Yum!). We had to go to the office to look up the lemon juice/sugar ratio. While we were back there I got some tape so I could fix the page Miriam had ruthlessly ripped out of one of Grandma's Christmas stories (her first real book-ripping; fortunately when I was fixing it I saw that several of the pages had been torn and taped through the years...that made me feel a little better about my destructive two-year-old).

"Hey, Mom!" Rachel called from her bed.

"What?" I called from the hallway. "Aren't you asleep?"

"No. What are you doing?"

"Oh, I'm just getting some tape to fix that book Miriam ripped," may all the book repair contacts I have forgive me; it's easier than rice paper.

"Oh...well...I thought I heard Dad say 'lemon juice...'" she said, sounding a bit like she suspected we were getting ready to party hardy without her. And being a little bit right about that if you consider Rummikub+lemonade partying hardy.

"Yeah. He's, uh, just...going to put some on a paper cut."

And with much snickering we escaped to the kitchen without being followed by any suspicious children.

Now we're just waiting for the day Rachel gets a paper cut and tries to doctor it up with lemon juice.

Later in the night I got a nasty paper cut, myself. Probably serves me right.