Capturing family memories - and craziness

Even before there were throwback Thursdays on Instagram, looking through old photo albums was always something my family and I ended up doing whenever there was a lull in activity. We must have at least 10 varying sizes of photo albums stacked in the kitchen closet. Every time we flip through the pages full of pictures of when we were all young, my mom and dad recount the stories that went along with a select few.

Two pictures that always get the main stage are of my sister holding me in a pool in Florida, and my brother hanging like a monkey off of my parent’s bed frame.  The background stories that came along with them summed up to the fact that my fear of the water started at a tender young age, and my brother was always so full of energy that he had to resort to flinging himself onto the bed at least 20 times a day. Only these and a few others get a funny story, but the rest are just moments in time in which the background story has been completely forgotten. For this reason, I try to take videos of what we randomly do, but it just so happens that my phone is never in sight when the most hilarious things happen.

Fortunately for me, my mom managed to get a great video the other day and then sent it to me. For as long as I can remember I have been crazy about people playing with my hair - a good crazy, where if you started playing with a curl you had better be prepared to sit down and keep at it for more than 10 minutes. My sister is the exact same way, so it wasn’t surprising that she managed to buy some spider-looking head massager, which is actually called a head massager spider.

The video started with my brother up on the chopping block. Once the massager covered his head his whole body started to convulse, and if it weren’t for him laughing I would have thought he was having a seizure: it was that serious. Things only got better from there when my brother set my sister onto Cirillo, who jetted across the room hiding his head. Then it happened, the highlight of the clip, when my sister turned to the smallest one of the bunch, Joselito. If a casting director were in search of a one year old that could freeze the blood in someone’s veins, Joselito would have gotten the role because his look of utter betrayal was too much to handle.

Let’s just say I have watched this video at least five times a day since, and have truly come to appreciate being able to record family memories.