Wherein things go from bad to worse.

We play a family game!

We are visiting my family in Virginia, and the assembled crowd includes my parents, all 4 of my siblings, two spouses, an exchange student who's been living with my family for three years, and two of the three Buds.

The game, announces one of my sisters, plays like written Telephone. Each person gets a stack of paper. On the top sheet, we are to write a saying or a phrase. Then we each pass our stack to the left, and the next person interprets the phrase in a drawing. Another pass, and the third person must - looking only at the drawing - write what they think the original phrase was. And so on, until each stack has passed completely around the group.

Oh yes, hilarity ensues.

My brother selects as his phrase, "I have a dream..."

This gets passed to my father, who draws what appears to be someone lying in bed either dreaming or smoking. Just say no, kids.

Next, my sister interprets this as the following:

We'll ignore the fact that a delightful fluffy cloud of dream-smoke does not a nightmare make. She passes the stack to me, upon which the whole thing heads downhill.

In my zeal to make sure the "boy" part of the phrase is understood, I draw an anatomically correct stick figure. I also clarify the bad dream portion by including another stick figure being shot. Seemed straight forward enough to me.

APPARENTLY NOT because the DNB passes this bad boy on to my mother. "MORNING WOOD?" I shriek when we review the stack later. Leave it to us to ruin a perfectly nice family game.

"Well, it definitely looks like the person is dreaming about watching a porn shoot," he defends himself. "Imagine how I felt having to pass that phrase on to your mom!"

Fortunately, my mother is sweet and innocent, and interprets this in the nicest, mommish way possible: morning, with a neat pile of logs.