My Crazy Family

Not everyone is blessed to be in a big crazy family like I am.  I am in the middle of seven kids and it's been a super wild ride in my thirty three years of living.  Sometimes growing up I wished there hadn't been so many of us.  But the older I get, the more grateful I feel for these amazing people that I've known my whole life.  No one, aside from Cody, knows me like they do.  No one loves me like they do.  No one wants to kill me like they do.  Even as adults we want to kill each other at times, but we'd kill FOR each other any day.

Cody has teased for years that we should write a "McCorkle to English" dictionary and fill it with all of our verbiage, inside jokes, and McCorkle-isms that no one outside of our family understands.  I sometimes wonder if we're weirder than other families because we are so chalked full of our own idiosyncrasies that I can't imagine any other family coming close to our strangeness.  We've been together for twelve years this month and Cody is still getting used to us as a group.  I can only imagine how overwhelming we are to newcomers.

My parents came in to town last week and the excuse was that they wanted to see the girls perform in the ballet.  They always seem to need an excuse to come visit, but in reality, they should know our door is open to them every second of the day, every day of the year!  Philip came in on Saturday and that's when the REAL fun began.  Good gravy how I love those people!  When Philip is around, we laugh until our sides hurt.  He is so goofy and off beat and is just plain hilarious to everyone.  Always has been, and it got him in a LOT of trouble growing up.

 But sometimes when I am with him and laughing so hard that I think I may split open, it makes me miss Joseph sooooooo much.  The two of them were like peas and carrots and I'm reminded of the huge void that Joseph left behind.  Philip says things that Joseph is supposed to finish.  I long to hear his laugh that went right along with Philip's laugh, almost like harmony.  But he's gone for now.  And it makes me want to take Philip and lock him up so that nothing bad ever happens to HIM.  Because I couldn't stand to ever lose the other half.  And right now I have a grapefruit sized lump in my throat and my eyes are starting to burn so I think I'll stop talking about that.  For now.

The last five days were so fun and I'm very sad that they all left today.  We stayed up way too late watching chick-flicks (Dad snores and Philip makes fun of them).  Saturday night Mom and I watched "Sweet Home Alabama" and cried our eyes out because Joshua Lucas bares a freakish resemblance to Joseph.  Maybe it's the actor, maybe it's the role as Jake Perry, maybe it's the voice....maybe it's all of it.  We cried and we talked about him til the wee hours of the morning.  We ate way too much good food and went out to eat at restaurants.  We played laser tag at home.  I got to lazy around with Mom and visit while she happily did all of our laundry, including folding it and putting a lot of it away.  Dad colored and made paper airplanes with the kids.  He and I made a trip to our local feed 'n seed store (or as the kids call it, the Rowdy store).  Philip rough housed way too much with the kids and they adored him for it.  We drank a lot of Hank's Gourmet Rootbeer.  We watched Ethan at his diving lesson.  Philip, the engineer, did a lot of science experiments with Ethan.  We did a lot of mundane things together, but we did them TOGETHER and that's what made it great.

And I cried a little on the way back from dropping them off at the airport, like I always do.  And I cursed the fact that they live so far away, and I thanked God for things like cell phones and airplanes because even if there's a few states between us, we're never really that far apart.  So until July.....