Cue the laugh track

Back in the spring, I made an impromptu trip to Virginia to spend Passover with my parents. The kids were with their dad and I was feeling lonely and like I needed to be around family, and I had the miles, so off I went.

While I was there, Lisa came over to say hi. She sat in the kitchen and hung out with us as we all bustled around getting ready for the seder. It was a typical scene for us - my dad cracking goofy jokes, my mom and I laughing as we made preparations, gossiping and telling stories. Noisy and funny and slightly chaotic.

At one point, Lisa made an observation that I found hilarious.

"I love hanging out with your family. It's like a watching a sitcom."

Our annual trip to the Outer Banks (where Lisa and her kids joined us for the second week) lived up to the billing.

We always get a house with a pool, which is lovely for cooling off after a day at the beach. I'm sure the dude who comes to clean the pool thinks we're pigs because we get sand all over the place, but the non-salty water feels so good after all the salt and sand of the beach.

The kids are in the pool CONSTANTLY. I am always amazed at their ability to spend 5 hours in the ocean and then come back to the house and spend another 3 hours in the pool. But they love it, and they sleep well afterwards, so it's fine.

They stayed in the pool even when it was raining.

Now, there are a couple of things you should know going into this story:

1. Josie still has a hair trigger temper, and can go from sweet-and-calm to losing-her-fucking-mind in about 30 seconds.
2. Zeke has an oral fixation. He chews everything, and every year we go to the Outer Banks, buy noodles for the pool, and he proceeds to destroy them by taking large bites out of them. It's super weird.

Anyway.

My niece Hazel is the master at thinking up new and exciting games, and for the kids' antics in the pool she came up with Shark. The person who is "it" has to stand at the end of the pool-deck with her back to the pool. The people in the water try to swim across without the shark jumping in and catching them before they get to the other side. I played it with them a few times - it's pretty fun and silly.

One afternoon, I was inside while all the children were in the pool when I heard Josie yelling about something. I'm not quite sure exactly what happened, but when I went outside to see what was going on, there was a big argument going on. Josie was accusing Zeke of cheating, Zeke denied cheating, others from the peanut gallery weighed in. Zeke continued to deny it until Josie became more and more irate.

She proceeded to lose her fucking mind.

She was crying and screaming and furious, ramping up the anger and indignation with every insistence by Zeke that he was innocent.

"YOU'RE CHEATING!! YOU'RE A CHEATER! YOU'RE LYING!"

"I'm not! I didn't do anything."

"LIAR!! LIAR! YOU'RE LYING!! YOU'RE A STUPID MIDGET!! YOU'RE A JERK!!"

"Josie," I implored. "You need to calm down and stop screaming." She was sobbing and out of control.

I also thought to myself, "midget"? what the hell is she talking about?

"I CAN'T CALM DOWN! HE'S A LIAR! HE CHEATED!!" She then turned to Zeke: "YOU CHEATED! YOU STUPID NUGGET!!"

Nugget? So it was nugget and not midget? or maybe both? 

I was getting confused. I was also starting to laugh but I couldn't do it out loud, so I was shaking and trying to keep it together.

"Josie, I don't know what happened because I didn't see it. But if he's being jerky and you don't like the way he's playing, then don't play with him. You always have that choice."

This didn't placate her. She continued to scream and cry as I tried to get her to either calm down or get out of the water and do something else.

At the end of her rope, she was shaking with fury and bellowed at Zeke, "I HATE YOU! YOU'RE A LIAR! YOU MIDGET! YOU NUGGET!! YOU NOODLE EATER!!!"

Noodle eater.

He's a noodle eater. And a midget and a nugget. But definitely a noodle eater. There were, after all, bites of foam noodle floating around the pool at the time.

Can we get this added to Urban Dictionary as an epithet?

Eventually I got her calmed down. She got out of the pool and I dried her off and got her something to eat, and it blew over. It was time for dinner anyway.

I didn't think, when we sat down to dinner, to give Zeke a big grin and offer him a big plate of spaghetti and ask if he wanted to eat some noodles. So it's not quite up to par, as sitcom scripting goes.

I'll have to workshop it.