For the first ten years of my life I felt very much like an exhibit in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.

This isn’t because I did things like walk around the playground slamming my arm into metal pipes hoping my arm would break so that I could get a brightly-colored cast for all my friends to sign. No. This was because I have a large family—which for some reason fascinated everyone.

“Are you all brothers and sisters?” Yes, we would say. “Do you have the same parents?” Yes, we would say again. “Are they married?”



Uh. No, they just get together now and then to produce another offspring.

“Are you Mormon?” No.

“Are you Catholic?” No.

“Are you part of a cult that has lots and lots of children?” Hmmm….not that we know of, but let us ask our mom.

What I knew as a child and what I still know, is that I was far more fortunate than any other child on earth because I had five best friends built in. Five best friends, I presumed, who would be there for life.

“Ok, Linds,” I would say “This is the deal. When we get older, we’ll want kids like our dolls, but we don’t want to be married so we’ll get married and have kids and then promise we’ll kill our husbands and live in a cottage in the woods with the kids, ok? Promise.” Lindsey would stare at me with her large, blue eyes and nod silently as she often did to whatever insanity I presented to her like, “hey eat this," when handing her some unidentified object.

Fortunately she didn’t always obey me.

“What about the other kids?” she would ask. Certainly we needed everyone else. So I told her: Landon would be our protector like he always was. He would also be in charge of games, which he also always did. Delissa, as the oldest, would cook for us and probably do some cleaning like she always had to do. “You can help her,” I would say to Lindsey. Desiree would make us do school which I would escape (like I always did) and Liam and I would do the hunting.

One holiday season the three youngest of us (Lindsey, Liam and me) decided we would make a beautiful gingerbread house for Desiree when she arrived home from Seattle where she was dancing. Delissa and Landon were gone, our parents were too. We set to work.

Our first mistake was using a recipe that was printed on the holiday table cloth. Then, after cutting out the sides of gingerbread that were now about 12” by 18” we realized we didn’t have enough gingerbread for four sides and the roof. We had enough for three sides and one slab of roof.

“I have an idea,” Liam suggested “Let’s use cardboard. It looks like gingerbread and we’ll just cover it in frosting anyway.”

“Great idea Liam,” I said to him and set to work. I’m sure Lindsey was shaking her prudent little head but Liam and I never listened to her anyway.

The pieces were so huge, though, that we couldn’t get them to stick and stay without sliding into a clump in the middle of the table. Mixing more and more frosting we plastered the sloped building until we thought it would finally stick.

It wouldn’t.

Three hours, several nails, glue mixed with the frosting and duct tape rolls later, Landon and Delissa arrived home.

We had frosting everywhere—including the ceiling and all over our entire bodies. The gingerbread house looked like a renovated dumpster had bred with a cream-bearing cow.

“Oh. My. Gosh.” They said and started laughing. “You guys are dead meat,” they added. “Is that….duct tape?”

Normally they rescued us but this time they didn’t. We were left to clean up the disaster ourselves and to give Desiree the ugliest, not-edible gingerbread house any human beings had ever seen.

We look much more innocent in the above picture than we ever actually were. Landon isn’t in the picture unfortunately. Or maybe he was just cleaning up one of our messes.