Nights at my grandparents' old house

Many years ago, my grandparents used to have nights when they would have a grandchild over at their house and have dinner with them and then get them a present. Being one of the younger grandkids, I didn't get much of that. But I do remember two such occasions.

On one of them, I was four or five. I remember going to the store with my grandma and she got me a Pinocchio book. At the checkout, I saw some Tic-Tacs, and I wanted them, so she got them for me. Then we went back to their house and I watched The Jungle Book. I fell asleep on their futon-esque chair. Then my mom came back  to pick me up, and my grandma told her about getting me Tic-Tacs. She probably thought it was a strange thing for a little kid like me.

I think I spent the night at their house one night when my mom had her gallbladder taken out, but that doesn't really count.

The other special night was I think when I was eight. I think they were trying to spend time with all the grandkids before leaving on a mission. I wanted to get pizza, so they got a pepperoni for me and a more mature one for them. Since I was the only one eating the one pizza, I ate five slices. While my cousins went to places like the Nickelcade, I just wanted to stay at their house. I had become interested in watching figure skating, and I noticed that they had a lot of old tapes of it, so I wanted to watch those. But soon that bored me, so we watched family videos instead. I wanted to watch Christmas 1988, when I was a baby, but since I wasn't even three months old, I had only a very brief cameo in a yellow outfit when David picked me up. The 1989 and 1990 Christmas videos were much more interesting. In the 1989 video, Susanne was eating a candy cane, and Grandpa was telling her to take it out of her mouth when she was on our brand new trampoline. I thought Grandpa was saying that in real life to her on the video, so I looked over at him. When we watched the 1990 video, Grandma was saying that my cousin Tammy was 14 at that time. The next morning, they took me to a video game store. The salesman recommended two video games for me, either Super Mario Land or Jeep Jamboree, but since I already had the Mario game, I got the Jeep game. As they were driving me home in their van, I remember saying that we (my family) were poor. Grandma started saying, "Well, you have..." and I said that I meant we were poor moneywise. (I'm not sure why I thought that--we weren't rich by any means, but I don't think we were poor.)

I even remember the day David came home from his night. We were at a T-ball game for one of my cousins, and my grandparents met us there. David had gotten the game Red Alert for Virtual Boy. During the T-ball game, Grandma kept yelling "Run run run run!" to the kids, and a toddler named Kahlil was copying her, and she said, "I have an echo!"