The Pens crushed the Capitals!!!

Whew! That series is over. The Pens crushed the Caps last night in a tense 6-2 game. That sounds contradictory, but there was never a moment during the game where you felt you could relax and say the 'Game over.' What a fantastic game Sidney Crosby played last night. He is a one determined young man.

Last Sunday was a difficult day. It's the first time I haven't had my mom to celebrate on Mother's Day. I'm happy that I have my husband and my boys to celebrate with and they treated me like a queen. But I do miss her presence in my life. I spent a lot of time thinking about my childhood and remembering the games I played every day. One of my favorites as a child was "Ring around the rosie". Can you remember when that was a fun game - when the spinning and spinning till you fell down was just the most fun you ever had in your life? How about playing jump rope and mastering the skill of jumping in while the rope was turning and jumping faster than your sister, learning rhymes in the process. (One, two three four five six seven, all good children go to heaven, some fly east, some fly west, some fly over the cuckoo's nest - Cuckoo! and then you'd jump out without missing.) When there were only two of us, we'd tie one end of the rope to the fire hydrant as our third person, so we could play the advanced jump rope games I enjoyed.

I loved playing jacks and getting all the way to tensies and scooping up those jacks with one hand! There were so many hours we spent sitting on our cement front porch catching a ball and picking up jacks. Seven Up was another fun game we played as we honed our bouncing and catching skills bouncing the ball off the brick wall on the side of our house. My sister loved throwing that ball under her leg and hitting the wall, or flipping the ball under her arm and catching it. She was better at most of these games than I was. And she beat me at all of them. She was especially good at cards and at Crazy Eights, a game she taught me after beating me at 500 Rum for the hundredth time in a row. Crazy Eights was a lot like UNO is, laying down cards of a similar suit or number. At the end of the game, you counted up the cards in your hand and that was the total number of smacks you got on your knuckles by the winner of the game. That was a game I lost a lot. As with all things in childhood, we teach these games to one another. One year, I taught my younger cousin how to play, won the game and delivered the smacks on the knuckles. I guess she told her mom (my aunt) and I must've gotten in trouble for it, because I still hear about it today.

Was life ever so much fun as it was when all we did was play games every day? At the end of the day you hated hearing your mom call and say "It's time to come in, the streetlights are on." I remember my childhood and I remember my mother. Happy Mother's Day, Mommy.