The Stang Clan

My father-in-law, Brian, came over today to help Brendan and I clean out our crawl space and basement for the radon reduction people to come on Thursday and put in their expensive expulsion system so that the buyers of our home don't get lung cancer. We have lived here for six years, and in that time increased the size of our family from three to five. Just as the size of our family has grown, so has the amount of stuff we've accumulated.

After a lot of hard work, done mostly by Brendan and his Dad, the basement looked ready for the radon guys to come. Much of the stuff came upstairs to our living and dining room. Here among the many boxes, I found one of my old boxes that my mom kept for me as a kid. In it were numerous pieces of art and several writing "samples" of mine from elementary school and junior high. It also contained a few books, my girl scout sash complete with sewn on patches, a miniature porcelain tea set that I'm going to save for the girls to play with at the new house, some old shirts I wore on various sports teams, and a big bag of clothes I dressed my various baby dolls up in.

It was great fun taking a trip down memory lane, especially seeing some of the pictures I'd drawn or made in art class and remembering them vividly after seeing them. In the box was my T-ball shirt, which I showed to Ian since he is playing his first year of T-ball. As much fun as it was looking at all my old valentines from one year (all but two were homemade, what a change from nowadays!), I knew I had to start getting rid of stuff. I made a pile to go out to the trash, and a much smaller pile of papers I just can't part with yet. (I plan on sharing some of my "gems" here soon - keep checking!)

After dinner I went back to the box and decided to share some of my worse writing attempts with Brendan. I read a horrible haiku about Autumn as well as an ode to the color yellow. Before I read the yellow poem, I introduced it as written by Heather, when she was a Stang (my maiden name).

Ian asked what a "Stang" was. Brendan replied that they were a clan of giants that hail from central Ohio with special skills in flatulance and beer drinking.

A pretty accurate description. Though he left out our true specialties: loud talking and the making of many babies.