The Grateful Eight

Last night was a somewhat typical Sunday. That’s why I’m writing about it. I want to remember this phase of our lives before it’s gone. The end is nigh. I can feel it.1

The whole family was at home. All eight of us. Rach called a moratorium on screens for the remainder of the evening, so our screenagers2 had a moment like when Chip Douglas falls on the dish at the end of Cable Guy and KG is forced to read a book for once.

We ended up playing a few round of Spoons3 while leftover bangers and mash heated up in the oven.

Dinner was dinner. All of us at the table, taking turns complaining about our potatoes being too hot and our sausages being too cold.4 We couldn’t complain too much, though, because it’s bangers and mash. Hot, cold, or on literal fire… That’s good eatin’, right there.

I finished dinner and retired to the living room while the kids cleaned the kitchen. They always find a way to squeeze a 10 minute job into 45, buzzing back and forth between the living room and kitchen umpteen times in the process.

The irony: everyone wants to be part of the action in the living room, but the action doesn’t start until the kitchen is clean. This lesson will never be learned.

Nora got out her violin to play something for us. She has roughly 30 minutes of training, so you can imagine how that sounded. This prompted Wes to fetch his guitar, which sounded meaningfully better than Nora’s violin screech, but he’s no John Mayer. Yet. This prompted Hazel to fetch Lyla’s ukelele from her room, which she didn’t have permission to touch. You can guess what that prompted. Total anarchy!

After we’d had our fill of instrument amateur hour, somebody had the terrible idea to play blind karaoke.

(I need to stop right here and make sure you don’t get the impression that we Santos are a musical bunch. I’ve been called many things in my days, but musical isn’t one of them. We do have a love for music, though, and I appreciate it all the more due to my ineptitude.)

So now you may understand just how dreadful an idea like blind karaoke was. After one or two attempts, we deleted “blind” from the game and managed to have a great time!

• Levi did Bohemian Rhapsody some level of justice
• Wes managed Ella Langley’s smash hit, Choosin’ Texas nicely
• I performed my GOTOs: Ice Ice Baby5 and Piano Man (with Hazel & Nora)
• Lyla and Levi teamed up for a crowd favorite, Yellow by Coldplay
• Rach got talked in to Party in the U.S.A. before switching to Sweet Caroline

The grand finale was a Hamilton rap battle between Ezra and Levi. They’ve both listened to that soundtrack so many times they probably could’ve done it blind, after all.

Then it was bed time, declared for everyone but executed at varying paces. The older kids have a knack for slow playing their wind down routines as much as we will allow. Which ends up being a lot.

I’m beyond grateful for this family the Lord has given me. We don’t always karaoke, but we do find ourselves hanging out all together like this a lot lately. If it were up to me, these days6 would never end. I know that’s not possible, so I’m doing my best to soak it up while I still can.

1. My oldest is 18 and my youngest is 7. We won’t be all together like this for long. ↩︎
2. A species of which have three, going on four ↩︎
3. A game that’s been around so long I played it when I was a kid and at the same time so uninteresting that the only thing I remembered about it was you grab spoons ↩︎
4. Mine was actually re-heated pretty evenly, but I think I was the exception ↩︎
5. Believe it or not I have the first two verses of this song memorized. The problem is I always forget the third verse exists. ↩︎
6. Rach has a shirt that says, “These Are The Days.” I think about that a lot. ↩︎