Laughing in the Ozark

Last year, my daughter won a week at a timeshare in the Ozark, so she invited my son and me to join her, her husband, and their daughter. The area was beautiful. Outside any bedroom window and from the deck you could see the lake.

Every morning I would awaken before anybody else, quietly make the coffee, and slip onto the deck with my laptop and coffee in hand. After a while I would hear the bustling from the condo, usually as a result of  7-year-old Myraiah finding my son’s candy pumpkins and Greg confiscating them and hiding them from her again and again. They both played hide ’n seek with those pumpkins the whole time.

The only problem with the condo was that it had only 3 bedrooms. My daughter and son-in-law took the master bedroom, my granddaughter was supposed to sleep in the middle room with the bunk beds, and the last room at the other end of the condo was left for my son and me to share – it held two queen beds and a bathroom.

Myraiah didn’t want to sleep alone though, so she shared my queen bed with me. And she complained about the bed, which sounded with every move like boulders rolling over cellophane-covered crackers – without the box.

So while my son and I were talking and moving on our separate beds, we would hear Myraiah, who was trying to sleep, say, “SHHHH!”

And we would laugh. And she would get angry and reprimand us again, which would cause us to laugh even harder, which would cause her to SHHHH even more vehemently.

“I mean it! Stop it!” she scolded. And then to my son, she added, “I’ll take away your pumpkins.”

Well, that caused us to roar with laughter. So I told her she could probably get better sleep if she slept in the bunk bed room, but she flatly refused to sleep alone.

The following night she got aggravated with my son and me again for laughing and decided she wanted to sleep with Mommy and Daddy. So we told her it was OK, but she argued that the room was too far away.

“It’s just down the hall,” I told her. “It won’t take you long to get there.”

“Yes, it will,” she argued.

“No, really, it won’t. You can be there in seconds.”

And she responded, “But not if you go in slow motion.”

My son and I exploded with laughter.