Spit

I speak of the card game, lest you were getting all gaggy thinking I might be contemplating saliva. (Which I could and maybe I will. But not today.) Today, I speak of the card game Spit and more importantly, the fact that the girls have been playing it nonstop since we returned home from our three-day endless drive multiple family multiple location Thanksgiving shenanigans.

They are playing it obsessively because their equally obsessive mother, aunt, and older cousins are one more hand of Canasta away from Gambler's Anonymous. That's right: Canasta, the card game of bronzed gin-swilling grannies everywhere. There wasn't even money involved, yet our furious shuffling, scoring, shouting, cheating was world-class. 

It used to be Mahjong and Rummy Cube for my mom and my aunts and I remember them playing games all afternoon too. (It was kind of a rite of passage when you were invited to the table to learn, aka: get your ass kicked.)  

The good news is that though it's clearly a genetic problem, it appears to be a situational disease, occurring only (but always) on family gatherings for them, and apparently, for me too -- except for that one time when me and my Vineyard friends, kid-less at the time, limitless in what we could do any damn night of the week, played freaking Canasta for hours upon hours upon hours. I know. It embarrasses me too. Canasta! Eegadsta! No kids and that's what we did? (There was also Dry Marco Polo but I am pretty sure I was sworn to never explain the deets on that one...) (Did I just write "deets", like, out loud? Oh gawd.)

So the girls half-ass shuffle and messily deal and maybe cheat and play and play. I step in for a couple hands, because I am a good mother after all, and it dawns on me that Spit is a math game -- a math freakin' game -- and I begin to feel all redeemed in passing along my card playing problem. An educational activity they are playing together? Who knew I was that good of a good mother? 

So I sneak off to read philosophy shower and fold laundry (in that order if you must know) and I am so very, very pleased with my... my... well... I am very pleased with just.about.everything. 

Then: it comes:

First a shout, then some words, then a crash, then another crash, and while I wish to hide under my bed, I am not that fast it appears because there they are, all red-faced and pissed off, with the GFYO in tow, because he loves him some good drama.

Let's just leave it with the immortal words of Kenny Rogers: you need to know when to fold 'em.