Ok Grandpa, here's something for you.
Some of my best memories are of sleeping over Grandpa and Cathy's with Alex and Katherine and Lisa and Amy. We were allowed to do ANYTHING. Sometimes we'd take down Grandma Cathy's flower arrangements to play with. Other times we'd spend hours inventing and perfecting our own version of pool. Often times we would enter "upside down world," flinging ourselves upside down over the furniture until all the blood rushed to our heads. There were cupcakes to be eaten right before dinner and artifacts to poke through in the upstairs crawlspace (home to our parents old text books and the famed accordian). We tested our strength in the back room by hanging from the bar in the ceiling and beating up the punching bag.
A bedtime? Well, we'd retire to the upstairs bedroom at a certain time and then precede to play cards by flashlight until the early morning hours. Or we'd leaf through Grandpa's Mad Magazine collection. How Grandpa and Cathy slept over the ruckus of our laughing and yelling I'll never know. And in the morning there were pancakes in the shapes of our initials.
Thank you to my grandparents for allowing us all to be kids and to my cousins for making those times so much fun.