Family Rules

Family Rules

I hope these are easy to read because they crack me up every time I look at them.  I cannot claim these as my own as my mom actually typed them up several years ago.  She showed them to me for the first time this last January when we got together with the extended family in Florida.  

Background

We used to go to Miami for Christmas and often enjoyed staying with my grandparents on my mom's side.  My aunt also lived there with her only daughter.  My grandpa had several strokes before I was old enough to really pay attention to my surroundings and as a result he was "confined" to a wheelchair.  By confined, I mean he walked himself around while sitting in a wheelchair.  I am sure that if he actually tried, he could have gotten up and gained better mobility.  His glasses were an inch thick and he would often come up to any given grandchild, grab our hand and ask "who is this"?  My cousin Raymond does the best impression of him.  

My grandmother had her schedule set in stone every weekday.  Get up, drink coffee and eat toast, finish her crosswords and turn on the soaps.  She would always record the soaps on other channels as well so she could watch them when she finished the first ones.  I feel like she was really lost on the weekends without her set schedule.  She was very nice, but you could tell she would get frustrated with my grandpa often.  

Enter my aunt and cousin into the picture and you would get a recipe for the perfect dysfunctional family for a hilarious television show.  Hence the family rules.  After many years of going to Miami for Christmas these rules were worked up to describe how to survive in that house.  I loved every minute I spent in that house.  There was a lot of yelling, blaming, jealousy, underhandedness.  I thought this was all very exciting.  No one was ever really mad at each other for longer than the moment of the confrontation.  I think any outsider that would have happened into this house would have thought we were all crazy. 

I still live by numbers 7 and 11.