impressing the "friends"

A few days before the big housewarming at my aunt's I get an email from her son asking if I can bring some of the board games and other amusements. The family has gotten into a phase of playing various board games during family parties. Most of the cousins aren't old enough to really party, much less drive and quite a few of the older ones have kids, so no galavanting for them. Thus, the board games, while the aunts and uncles gamble.

Scrabble is our main game with its variant of Take One. The younger kids love Twister. And when EVERYONE is in town, my brother got us addicted to Mafia, which inevitably makes most of us lose our voices. But, our latest addiciton is Cranium, a game that combines just about every game out there: name that tune, pictionary, charades, word play with their slight variations like humming a tune, pictionary with the artist's eyes closed or using clay instead of paper.

My cousin asks because he has friends coming over to the party and he wants to impress upon them how "fun" of a family we are. So, I think, sure, ok.

We get to the party and my cousin's friends come in. We soon pick up the pattern, they're all girls. My cousin is what 14 years old. This should be interesting. My initial impression is that my cousin must be the "nice guy" in class who is always sweet and courteous to the girls. Considering that the majority of the cousins are women and that they are all his ate how could he not be the nice guy.

They spend most of the afternoon upstairs hanging out in the bedrooms with the other teenage cousins. As the party settles a bit, they come downstairs, where he goes to the piano and plays them his newly learned pop love songs. He's an excellent piano player. His friends sit on the couches. They look interminably bored. Though the SO notes that one of them was impressed by his piano skills and sat beside him with her hand on his shoulder. I'm sure we'll ask him all the intrusive and teasing questions at the next party. yup!

It's not often that we get to meet the friends of our family members. So it's always interesting to see the friends they hang out with. It's another side to them we don't often see. Being on the old end of the cousin spectrum, I've watched a lot of them grow up from being the 2 and 3 year olds that were running around that night, to some of them who are now in college and dealing with bigger issues of the heart than simply "impressing" the friends. It's nice to see that we're all basically good folk.

I don't keep track of the names of "cousin's friends" until I start to see them at several of the family parties. And then I don't really find out people's last names until I see them on the wedding invitation. There are just too many of us to occupy that much brain space.