22 People. Three Days. One House.

This weekend, my family and I went on a retreat with two other families to a lake house a couple of hours away. We had six adults, two teenage sitters, and 14 kids ranging in age from 12 years to 3 months.

Here are a few things I learned:

1. Teenage girls have an emotional range rivaled only by opera stars and 50 year old women hopped up on estrogen pills and St. John's Wort.

2. Going to a Predators hockey game is quieter than 14 kids in one room trying to watch Monster's Inc.

3. When wiping down the outside eating area at night, surrounded by a cloud of gnats and moths, it is best not to inhale with one's mouth open. Actually, it's best not to inhale at all.

4. One cannot walk down the steep (!!!) ramp leading to the dock with "traction-less" flip-flops on one's feet. Unless, of course, one enjoy's exfoliating one's posterior in full view of everyone on the lake.

5. Spiders like bedsheets.

6. 22 people. Three bathrooms. Do the math.

7. When playing Yahtzee (after the kids are finally asleep. Yay!), one must carefully watch the sweet, mild, quiet types. Something about the act of tossing five dice onto the table turns them into sneaky, competitive, somewhat violent people who will stop at nothing to annhiliate those they love.

8. Nacho Libre is a truly funny movie. (Get that corn outta my face!)

9. Boys take risks like rowing across the lake in an inflatible raft and exploring the rocky shore without wearing shoes.

10. Grown men take risks like detouring from their hike along waterfalls to run fifty feet out onto a railroad bridge where their only options, should a train come along, are jumping 125 feet to their death or getting crushed by a locomotive racing full-speed ahead.

It was a fun weekend and much more relaxing than I've made it sound here. We're looking forward to going again next year. =)