When The Parents are Away....

Sometimes people ask me what it was like to grow up in a family with seven kids. Somehow I think they expect sob stories about not getting enough attention from my parents....or never being able to go to the bathroom....or of starving when we ran out of food.

Well, the running out of food part did happen. During the peak few years when my parents had the highest number of teenagers and the highest number of kids living at home....the pots and pans we owned weren't really big enough to cook quite enough food as we would have happily devoured, and if you didn't eat fast, you didn't get seconds. But you always got firsts....as long as you were at the table when dinner started, that is.

 2007. Approximately what we looked like when adventures like this were taking place.

But you won't hear any sob stories from me about growing up in a big family. Once I was a teenager, my parents would leave all 7 of us home alone when they went out on dates or went to meetings...and those days of being left home alone were the foundation for some of the greatest adventures of my childhood.

It's not so much that when my parents left we would do bad things....it was more that when my parents left, we would do things that they probably wouldn't have said "yes" to if we'd had to ask them.

One day, we decided to get creative and perform a science experiment we'd found in a textbook: use newspaper and cardboard and tape to build a container around a raw egg, drop it off a balcony, and see if the egg cracked or if it remained whole.

It's an educational activity, what could go wrong? We lined up on the 2nd story balcony, and dropped our egg packages. Only, Someone, didn't drop theirs. Someone threw their egg package. Someone threw it so hard that it didn't land anywhere in our (admittedly, very tiny) yard, and instead landed  on the other side of a cement wall, in our neighbor's yard (it's the very same cement wall with metal bars sticking out of it that you can see in the background of the group photo above).

We stared at one another in shock, and instantly ran back into the house. I was all for simply forgetting this incident, but Lizzy insisted on being responsible, trying to get the neighbors' attention to apologize and get the egg package back. Isaac and I hid inside the kitchen and peeked through cracked windows as Lizzy went outdoors and jumped around and made noise till she got the attention of the little aunty who lived next door. She tried to ask the aunty to hand the paper package back over the fence, but the aunty didn't speak much English, so first she gave Lizzy a couple of limes from their lime tree. And then some curry leaves from their curry leaf tree. Finally, she saw the newspaper package, by this time oozing with egg, and picked it up and gave it to Lizzy. "Feed your dog?" the aunty asked. 

Flustered, Lizzy said, "Umm, yes! Thank you! Sorry!" and ran back inside, where Isaac and I were rolling on the floor, cracking up at the ridiculousness of the whole exchange.

Have you ever performed this particular experiment?