A family that laughs together, stays together.......

"There's one in every family".

Let's face it, we have all said that about someone in our husbands' family, or even the next door neighbours' family, but I would like to say it whole-heartedly about someone I have actually given birth to.

Our Ellie is an absolute treasure. Sweet, loving, kind, generous, thoughtful, a real encourager and generally quite smart, but Ellie is also the sort of person who can fall over while standing still.  And some days, when she opens her mouth, I'm all like - "what the....."

For instance, we were in the car and talking about the Indian meal we were going to make for dinner. We'd just go onto the subject of Naan bread, when Ellie piped up with " We don't have any bananas at home".

The silence was deafening, and then Harri and I fell about laughing. It could very well have been a "didn't really hear what you were talking about moment", but we all laughed until we cried.

Another instance of Ellie's mouth open without too much thought, was when we were talking about the backyard and what we would do with it if we had enough money for a re-design. A pool was high on the list and Harri said "we'd probably have to cut down the trees to make room for it", when Ellie looked at him, puzzled, and said "we don't have any trees in the back yard'.

We have at least two big one just outside and five others on the boundary. Every year when they drop their leaves, Ellie goes outside and kicks them around, last year we built a bird house and hung it from one of the bigger trees' low branches.

The other thing is, Ellie's brother is one of the biggest stirrers that I know - not in a mean way - but just to get some laughs. Not an opportunity passes him by. If he can give you a hard time about something dumb you've done or said, he will grab the moment with both hands. and with Ellie's natural gifts, he has plenty of material.

Generally, I try to discourage this from happening too often - I don't want Ellie's self confidence to suffer too much at the hands of her brother -  but it occurred to me the other day that she actually enjoys this attention - she gets as much of a laugh out of it as Harri does.

As families do, we tend to bring these things up every now and again and we all get a good old fashioned laugh over them. Harri firmly believes that these things should be written down for future enjoyment and I tend to agree with him.

Anything that gets us laughing together is a good thing. There's never enough laughter in the world. Keep laughing and it keeps the tears at bay.