Royally Unique

Must… refrain… from strangling… stupid people…….

I went to a “tea party” on Sunday. The Sister-In-Law decided to have one for all the girls in the family, and the boys go to have a treasure hunt thing.

Next year will be better, as I intend to help with the planning this time (the treasure hunt will have a map leading them to different areas and they have to find an item at each area, at the end they put the items together and it’s a game to play or something, and the girls’ tea party will be show and tell, where the older ones get to write a poem/song and share it, and the younger ones can either try that or bring a favorite item to share) but for this being the first time I think it went okay.

The girls had to be upstairs while we got their table ready for them and so the boys helped us set it. It was adorable how much they enjoyed it–wiping the tea plates clean, setting plates out, gushing over how extravagant our table was set up, etc.

So it was nice, but not majorly exciting. Really the most fun I had was setting the table with the boys.

Afterward though, when the children were all ready for bed but just playing around in the room–and while I waited for my husband to finish working on his mom’s computer–I decided to go up and visit with the kids. After a few minutes I decided I’d read to them. I said, “first book I get, I’ll read.” So they ran off and came back with a handful of books. I read the first one, then had time for as second, which was the story of Jonah. Almost all of them said, “Oh, yeah, Jonah,” or “Oh I know this one.”
“Good,” I said, deciding to make it more entertaining, “Then you can help me read this one. One day, God told Jonah to go to Puyallup.”
“What??” The 7-year-old said, looking at me incredibly confused.
“Ninevah,” her brother corrected me.
“Oh okay, God told Jonah to go to Ninevah.”
It continued like that for a few pages until they decided to add references from the Veggietales version.
“Why did the other people wake Jonah up?” I asked them.
“To make everyone see whose fault it was.”
“To shoot him out of a bowling ball!”
The 10-year-old decided to get silly, “No, you guys are getting the movie wrong!”

So now I can’t wait for the next sleepover my in-laws have so I can read more stories.

So I found out this girl I know (she’s slowly becoming a friend, we’ll call her Bryn) tried committing suicide this last week, and this isn’t the first time. I’m going up to visit with her tomorrow and hopefully help a little. She’s had a lot of issues in the past, one of which included her having to watch her best friend get hit by a car and die. Mix that with another friend who had nightmares involving buses and the result is my own nightmare. I watched someone get hit by a bus. I could have called out “watch out” or something, but I figured the bus would see him, right? Wrong. He got hit and died and it was a very devastating dream. I remember crying a lot and figuring I knew how Bryn felt, except in her case it was her best friend. In mine, it was someone I didn’t know. But I can multiply that regret and sadness that I felt and figure out her feelings.

I have never dealt with this specific issue. I’ve dealt with friends who have anorexia, sort of–none of them have ever been hospitalization-bad–and I know MANY people with depression, but none of them have tried suicide that I know of.

Bryn also has issues with self image and mean people. So I’m hoping I can help her not be so depressed. Those things I can try to give advice for, the rest of it, no matter what I say, will definitely take time. I’m not sure what I’ll say.