Tag Archives: Embarrassing

I Shouldn’t Tell. I Couldn’t Tell. Okay, I’ll Tell.

6 Replies

Congratulations! So far, you’ve made it safely in your journey through the Crazie Family Tree.  Keep climbing to learn about Craig.

If you’ve lost track of the other Crazies, click here.

Last But Not Least

Leave me alone. I can do it myself.

Sibling Position #8 – 18 years younger than me.

Although I noticed very little as a teenager, I did notice, in my senior year of high school, that Mom had been sick for several weeks. She came home from her teaching job exhausted and spent her time at home wrapped up in a quilt on the sofa. When she and Dad called a family meeting, I burst into tears, expecting the worst. Then they told us Mom was pregnant.

Mom Pregnant at my high school graduation

Mom Pregnant at my high school graduation

Drying my tears, I heard sobbing from the corner of the room, as my 21-year-old sister imagined the humiliation she’d  endure when her college friends discovered her parents still had sex. Ewwww!

Mom and I got busy arranging for the new sibling. A classmate and I spent the last semester of our Home Economics class frantically sewing maternity clothes – one set for my mother and one set for her.

At the end of the summer Mom and I  worked to squeeze a crib into her tiny bedroom.

Certain she’d had enough boys, we pasted cutouts of Holly Hobby dolls on the wall and bought pink dresses and blankets.

With her previous pregnancies, Mom’s doctor encouraged her to keep smoking as they’d determined it kept the size of the baby smaller, making for an easier delivery.  He’d also prescribed diet pills (amphetamines at that time) that she took during pregnancy, so she could fit back into her girdle and long-line bra as quickly as possible after the birth.

But, now it was the 70’s and danger lurked around every corner. For the first few minutes after Craig was born, Mom refused to open her eyes, certain that he’d be completely deformed from the fumes she’d inhaled at the ceramic’s class she’d taken before she realized she was pregnant.

None the worse for wear, Craig came into the world at a healthy eight pounds plus. I’ll never forget the blissful smiles on may parents’ faces as they walked in the door with him.

I can’t say the same for little brother, John, who was being replaced after ten years as the baby in the family. Craig says he was well into his teens before Mom and Dad convinced him that he was not the adopted stray John said he was.

Craiger McGregor

Craiger McGregor

Mom spent the next eighteen years being an overprotective mother to her littlest one. Dad spent the time trying to toughen him up. The picture to the left is a perfect example. As Dad coerced Craig to go higher, Mom yelled from the porch to get him down before he fell and broke his arm. Which is exactly what Craig did – fall and break his arm, I mean.

Perhaps, like my mother, I’m feeling overprotective. All the stories I can think to share about Craig are just too embarrassing.

I shouldn’t tell you the story about the time, as a four-year-old he stood on the hood of the car at a baseball game with his pants around his ankles, peeing like the famous Manneken Pis statue in Belgium.

And I couldn’t tell you about the time when Craig, as a fourteen-year-old boy special ordered an item using Dad’s credit card.  The package arrived….no, no. I’ll stop right here. I wouldn’t want to embarrass him.

Wait. What am I saying?

Okay, I’ll tell.  The package arrived – and because Craig had used his parent’s credit card it was addressed to Dad.

At dinner, Dad opened the package.  His brow furrowed in confusion.  He looked across the table at Mom and said, “Ginger? Are you trying to tell me something?”

Where There’s Smoke – There’s a Beehive Hairdo and a Spatula

2 Replies

I’ve spent the last few weeks talking about the four Big Kids from Crazie Town, now it’s time to pick on talk about our little ones.

The Little Kids: Tom, John, Rick - and our latecomer, Craig

The Little Kids: Tom, John, Rick – and our latecomer, Craig

————————

The biggest of the Little Kids is Tom, Sibling #5 (four years younger than me.)

Future Mayor of Crazie Town and Tom

Future Mayor of Crazie Town and Tom

Tom was the smartest in our group. He had an engineer’s mind, always rigging up some sort of gadget.

Mike and I built our forts out of dead limbs propped up against a tree and we installed security by tacking up a sign that read “No Little Kids Allowed.”

Tom built his with lumber and large sheets of rusted tin that had fallen off the roof of the barn. He enlisted the other little kids and they eventually added a working fireplace and then built a bridge across the creek. He retaliated to our security system by booby trapping the path to The Little Kids fort, burying upturned nails along the trail. Unless you knew the right way to go, you’d be limping home.

The aforementioned fireplace was strictly forbidden by our mother – No Fires Ever! Tom realized the smoke on his clothing gave him away, so when he came home from fire building he cleverly threw his clothes directly into the washer.  Although smarter than us, he wasn’t smarter than Mom, who knew the only time her kids did their own wash was if they’d done something wrong. Finding Dad’s missing Zippo lighter in the bottom of the washer was also a good clue.

My entire childhood, a carved wooden paddle from Dad’s fraternity hung on the wall in the dining room. If we kids acted up too much, Dad would holler “Don’t make me get the paddle!” He never once took it off the wall, (in fact, we were never spanked) but we believed that this would be the time he finally did.

Dad had a unique way of disciplining children. I remember a rainy summer evening. My older sister and brother were fighting over who got to ride the trike on the covered porch. They were going at it pretty good and Dad was tired of it — probably the wild kingdom noises coming through the window disturbed him watching The Wild Kingdom on television. Anyway, he marched out to the porch and said, “That’s it!” He put Janet at one end of the kitchen table and Mike at the other, gave them both knives and said “You two want to kill each other – do it right.” And then, stomped back to the living room and turned up the volume on the television.

But, I digress. This is Tom’s story.

He was the one kid in our family not intimidated by our parents threats of bodily harm.

One morning as Dad tried to wrangle half a dozen kids through breakfast, getting ready for school and on the bus, Tom refused to get out of bed. Dad, frustrated beyond the breaking point, shouted “Wake Up!” and threw the pancake spatula against The Little Kid’s bedroom wall.  There was dead silence as we waited to see Tom come stumbling into the kitchen. Instead, the spatula flew back out of the room, taking off the top two inches of Mom’s beehive hairdo.

I can’t tell you what happened next. Not because it’s too horrible for words, it probably was, but because before that spatula hit the floor I was out the door and running to the end of the driveway to wait for the bus.