Competitiveness has taken on a whole new look in our family.  We all pride ourselves on being serious game players.  Whatever we’re playing and whoever we are playing against, we play to win.  I know we’ve passed down this quality to our kids (sorry, kids), and they’ve even married people who fit in with us quite nicely.  But, like I said at the outset of this post, we’ve just taken it up a notch.

At a recent family gathering my eldest son asked a simple question to his siblings, “How many of you have visited Grandpa at the Assisted Living Facility?”  It was a two-two split, with an edge given to the son who lives out of town and hadn’t visited the ALF.

I think the inquirer was hoping for a little company in his non-visiting status, but leave it to him to make a new competition out of the situation.  Next he asked, “Let’s see who the most pathetic really is.  Who reads Mom’s blog?”

Here he was left as the lone hold-out.  It’s not like he’s not supportive of my writing; he is.  He’s just not into reading blogs so I think he was a little surprised to be the only non-reader out of the seven kids.*  Surprised or not, he proudly declared himself the Most Pathetic.  Yep, that’s how our family is – if you’re going to do something, or not do something, do it all the way, you know, win.

I think we’re going to have to come up with new criteria for the Most Pathetic award, though, because the following week he subscribed to my blog.  He might even be reading it.  I guess I’ll find out for sure after this post, so this is my thank you to him for reading and a welcome to my blog.

*Four of whom I gave birth to, three of whom married my children, all but one of whom had actually read at least one blog entry.  Such reading may or may not have been coerced, but it still counted in the contest as points for having read my blog.  But now that I think about it, my one son-in-law was awfully quiet during this exchange, but since he had visited the ALF, he still was ahead.  The final opinion of the judges stands as no instant replay of this discussion is available.