A Post From the Stylish Hippo

Yes, yes, some explaining is in order after a title like that. I know. Bear with me.

My sister and her family are all visiting from the Midwest, up here socialising with my family and my other sister's family for Chrissie. Hilarity and chaos ensue whenever these people visit, let me tell you.

Yesterday my mum, my sisters, my nieces, and I all went out to the mall to do some shopping. Why, you ask? I have no idea. I don't understand people who shop just to shop. Wandering on foot for hours and hours looking at things I cannot afford to buy is not my idea of a good time. But I digress.

The Mothers, as my nieces and I call them, went off in search of bargains, while my nieces and I (Lyssa and Hattie) decided to ramble aimlessly. (Random question: how can one *decide* to ramble aimlessly?) We went from store to store, looking and admiring and getting our little paws all over everything from make-up to beaded prom dresses.

When we meandered into the prom dress shop, ostensibly to pick out our fantasy dresses we might possibly like to wear to some nebulous social event in the future, Hattie made me laugh really hard by picking up one of those illogically pretty pumps with tall clear plastic heels.

"Look," she giggled, sticking her hand through a round hole punched in the middle of the clear plastic of one of the heels. "These are shoes you should wear to church. They're holey shoes!"

I do love a good pun.

After cruising the mall for a good five or six hours, my sister realised she needed to pick up something from a nearby hardware store. She drove to the store and left all the rest of us in the van while she bought the needed item. MISTAKE! LOL!

Because she'd heard it played so many times in the stores while they were shopping, my other sister started singing "I'll Be There" over and over again, except that she couldn't remember most of the words, so she just substituted "I'll be there, with the love that, uh...doodle do...de do do doodle do..." The rest of us burst out laughing.

Then she pulled out a little first-aid kit from under the seat in front of her. She and Lyssa (her daughter) started fighting over it, pulling on it and grabbing things out of it until even Hattie yelled at them to stop being so immature. "Mo-om," my sister pretended to whine to our mother in the front seat, "she's not being nice. Make her stop. *I* want the first-aid kit, Mom! Why does *she* always get it?"

This is my grown-up (?) sister for you. ;)

Then I jumped into the fray with the story of one of the great composers (can't remember which one) who had a wife who thought she could sing. She began to practise one morning when the woman who lived in the flat below theirs left for work. When the woman came back from work in the afternoon, the composer's wife was at it again. "Oh Lord," the woman cried, looking up at the top of the building and crossing herself, "it's four o'clock and the baby still isn't born yet!" (Shamelessly pirated, though paraphrased, from Victor Borge's very funny book My Favorite Intermissions. Go read it.)

We went on and on in that fashion, with Hattie whacking Lyssa and me over the head with her sneakers, my sister persisting in singing her version of "I'll Be There," my mum flipping open the cell phone to beg my father to come get her out of there, and all of us laughing fit to kill. It was a great time.

Lyssa came back to the house with us after and stayed overnight. We watched a movie with Mum and Dad, then talked for an hour and watched an hour's worth of Jerry Bruckheimer's King Arthur. At 1 a.m., we decided that that was enough and went to sleep, saving the rest of King Arthur until today. Before we went to sleep, though, Lyssa brought up something that had happened the last time she was visiting: she and I had gone shopping on our own, and we were in one of our favourite stores.

"Does this look too...I don't know...trashy ghetto?" I asked her, holding up a glittery shirt.

"No, no, it looks...kind of stylish hip-o!" she answered, trying to answer me in the same singsong I had used.

I doubled over laughing. "Are you calling me a HIPPO?"

"NO! That's not what I meant! Stop it!" she protested, giggling.

Ah, that was fun. That phrase, "stylish hippo," will forever live in our vocabulary.

Oh yes, before I forget, I am very remiss: little Charlie Crowe's second birthday was on the 21st of December. Happy birthday, Charlie! So cute! :)

I'm signing off now...