Party stories where the kids steal the show

I think there are several stories about family parties that I haven't told you yet.

Brita is only about a year old here.

I have told you before how neat and clean Brita always was? They used to tell us about when Mama had Henrik and Sara and Brita -- so Brita was about three years old -- Mama would dress Brita first and set her on a chair and she never moved. Mama could go get the other kids ready and Brita wouldn't move until they came to get her to take her along. She always wanted to make sure they didn't forget her though, so she would sit shock still on the chair saying, "Göm inte Brita! Göm inte Brita!" She couldn't quite say the "l" that should come in there: glöm. It means, "Don't forget Brita! Don't forget Brita!" but she didn't move off the chair.

One time we were all invited to Västergården i Grönede; it was when Oskar and Frida were engaged to be married. At one point at the end of the evening when we were getting ready to go home, Frida went and sat on Morbror Oskar's lap and put her arm around his neck. Sara must've been about 8 or 9, and she didn't like the looks of this. She marched up and looked at Morbror Oskar and said, "Now it's time for you to go home to Mormor!"

There was another family party; I don't remember if it was a wedding or what. Everybody was there and it was winter. Karin i Rimforsa had crawled up in the windowsill and sat and one of the young men at the party told her she shouldn't sit there because she'd get cold and get sick. She looked up at him and said, "Don't worry about me. I have two pairs of underwear on!" At this same party, I was about 2 1/2 and getting potty trained and Mama was trying to take me out so I could go to the bathroom but there were lots of people in the hallway.  She said I looked up and hollered, "Move! I have to pee!"

I think I've said before that when they had these parties and it was time

These are Mom's butter paddles; they
hang on the wall in my kitchen :)

for the food, the ladies went first and then the men and the kids went last. Dad used to tell about one party they went to and when he came around the table to get food, there stood a little boy who said, "Just look at it all disappear." Dad thought that the boy was afraid there wouldn't be anything left when his turn came. Dad always thought, "Why not let the kids go first?" But the ladies really went out of their way to serve the food attractively and they wanted the other ladies to see it first. Men probably didn't care as much and the kids didn't care at all so long as they got some!

One thing the ladies did for these parties is they liked to put up butter in fancy forms. Sometimes they made round balls, or balls with grooves in them; other times they made other shapes like stars. My mother had a special pair of wooden paddles that she used to make these; I think Elizabeth has those paddles now.

And I remember one party when Nils-Erik was kind of the life of the party. Nils-Erik looked like a cute round-faced doll when he was little. He had beautiful blond curly curly hair, and Rut refused to have it cut; he looked almost like a little girl it was so long and curly. Curly hair did kind of run in the family. Ernst and Nisse and the girls in Rimforsa all had curly hair. The rest of us had hair as straight as could be. Well, for this party, the whole family was invited to one of my mother's cousins. She lived not far from Rimforsa, so the Rimforsa cousins were there too. Morfar was there and Morbror Nisse and Rut and their kids.

Butter balls with mint :)

Nils-Erik was old enough to talk and notice things but not really old enough to know what he should or shouldn't say. As Nils-Erik was going along the food table with Morbror Nisse to get something to eat and he stopped in front of the butter plate with the fancy shapes and just stared at the little sprig of parsley on the side of the plate as decoration. Then he looked up and said very loudly, "Titta Papa! These people are crazy! They put grass in their butter!" ("Titta" is Swedish for "Look")

Later, a group of us went down to the train station to see off some of them who had come to the party on a train. Us younger ones had ridden our bicycles but we went down to the station to see them off. At the station, there sat a lady with a little dog, one of those where the long hair falls every which way and you don't hardly see which way is front or back. Nils-Erik marched up to this lady and said, "That sure is a mop that you have there!" The lady looked at his hair and said, "Well it looks like you have one too." Nils-Erik laughed and laughed.