The noise of 28 humans rumbles through the house in a way that makes me think my mom needs more carpet. (Is an area rug an inappropriate birthday gift?) I’m a wood floor person, but all of us together (especially with 10 in our crowd being 4 years old or younger) just makes it seem like we need some more insulation. In April, when a fire started licking mom’s beautiful white cabinets, while the alarms blared, the children went outside for their ears sakes, but none of the adults even moved. The chaos is just too normal, most things are unlikely to make my family flinch. It’s a storm and, actually, it reminds me of that breakfast scene in Cheaper by the Dozen. Remember when the entire room erupts into madness? It seems to almost always feel like we’re near that level of disorder, even though we haven’t had a frog jump directly into our scrambled eggs.
It feels like there’s always at least one child screaming for an unknown reason, the toddlers push each other around on the trampoline in a way that has us all cringing, and there’s always either not enough food, or way way too much food. Cliques form around the house as 3-5 adults make separate conversations, and inevitably the groups migrate and merge as the volume continues to rise, because even though we’d like to have separate conversations, we want to have them all in the exact. same. place.
I imagine the entire situation could be compared to being in a mosh pit at a rock concert. At the end of the night you’re a little bit deaf, you’re exhausted from all the movement, but you couldn’t stop while you were there, because the energy was a 10 and you can’t not be a 10 when you’re with those people, and in that place.
Our regular weeknight dinners are more intense than most families entire holiday season. But… it’s magic. There’s no formality in the way we sit down. There’s no passing of the entrees around a beautifully set table, and our children aren’t learning manners (unfortunately), but they’re getting time together. The cousins play so hard they tend to sleep a bit later the day after. We sisters get a chance to reconnect while we sip hot or cold teas, and coffees, while we breastfeed the abundance of babies we have in our midst. This familiar routine is a staple we can look forward to each week. We have a family dinner on both sides - Frost and Bonin. And both give us so much to be thankful for. And I want to be clear: we are not perfect families. I don’t want to over-romanticize the picture of what it is to be one of us. We have skeletons in our closet just like most. But it’s OK, we just get together and hang out anyway, skeletons and all. And we’re all the better for it.