"It's a brother and a sister kinda thing.."

Our family has always enjoyed playing games. It get's kinda crazy around here sometimes, as we're extremely slightly competitive. This could be why we like these games so much. One of our new favorites is:

Jordan gave it to us for Christmas knowing how amazing it is.

The goal is to use every single one of your letter pieces in a huge crossword puzzle, no names, abbreviations or slang terms are allowed (e.g. "Yo" or "Sup.")

You start with 15 pieces, and try to put them all together into words as fast as you can!

The first person to do so correctly shouts "Bananagrams!" and each player grabs five more pieces. You can now try to add it to the words you've already made, or sometimes you just can't. So you need to re-assemble your puzzle to fit the new pieces.

It gets rather insane occasionaly. Like, when you have two more pieces left and you can not fit them in ("Come on guys, how 'bout we all can put back just two pieces, okay?") or when you have a Q and you don't have one U, so that just isn't fair at all. At all. Or you just know that ''Vet'' is a word of it's own, it is so NOT an abbreviation for Vetranarian! Or when you could just swear that apple just came out with a new thing called an ifeet, these shoes which play music, so you can totally put that lonely I in front of feet. Yes, we come up with many different excuses. but it's still pretty awesome.

You could even say it's educational, 'cause you know, you spell things.


(Title lyrics from Me and My Gang by Racal Flatts

"Cause I'm a backwoods boy, grew up on a dirt road.."

The fresh Spring air was calling to the boys, the weather was just perfect for mud! They threw on their sandles and headed out into the pleasently warm sun. The mud looked just perfect, not too cold, yet not to mushy, it was going to be great! They galloped down to the lake as fast as they could!

As the two boys tore off their shorts and sandles, Gregory began to wonder about this new sport.

The mud looked alfully icky, and how did it not “Just sink down and gobble us up?” Besides, getting all muddy did not sound very apitizing to this little boy. AJ sighed waiting for him to decide, and finally lost his patience as he ran off into the delicious mud.

“I, I just don’t even understand how he could even like this stuff?” Gregory exlaimed, discusted with his dirty hands and feet.

However, after much prompting from his sister, Mr. MacGregors decided he would not let his brother beat him in this competition of messy-ness.

He dug and stomped his feet in the soft mud. He ran around in circles, and felt pretty good about it! After just a few minutes of this, Gregory realized that this activity was quite enjoyable! The wet dirt almost felt good between his toes, and his imagination took the better of him as he made of silly games to play.

The champion pose for his pictures the remainder of his time, but the sudden shock of all his messy-ness stopped him. Again, he was rather discusted with his dirty hands and feet, so off he went to find a solution to this mess!

After searching for many different ways of trying to clean his dirty feet, he had almost given up! Finally, he came upon his brother, who had finished his hunt, and had found a brilliant way of cleaning himself up.

 After all was said and done, Gregory agreed that being messy, really was worth it!

(Title lyrics from Backwoods Boy by Josh Turner)