Family Fun: Ping-Pong Style

The older our kids get, the harder it is to herd them all together for family gatherings.  Bob, Mr.4444's brother is in retail management, and he lives about three hours away, so his family never gets to celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas the way other people do. He also doesn't get many weekends off, so when he can make it home, Grandma 4444 likes to get everyone together for dinner. This weekend, Bob and part of his family came home for the Packers game.

Kyle (a U.W. Milwaukee student) was unable to come home, and we missed him, along with his cousins, Anna and Robbie. We had dinner at Grandma 4444's house Saturday night. 4444 family dinners are always entertaining, and last night was no exception, as you can see from this photo of Bob laughing so hard that he couldn't breathe half the time and had to take his glasses off and wipe his tears more than once, cracking up the rest of us, too.

A dinner without all five 4444 cousins just isn't the same, but we managed to reach them by phone during and after dinner, and I guess that's all we can do.  Hopefully, we'll all be together at Christmas.  

Uncle Bob made up for Kyle's absence, though, by sharing a video that he took of Mr.4444 and Kyle performing a fun game they like to "play" every now and then. See if you can figure out why it's so funny.

For those of you who are confused, they are pretending to play table tennis (a.k.a. ping-pong  in our neck of the woods), using a cross of pantomime and noises they make with their mouths; there are no actual paddles or a ball in their game.  It turns out pretending to play ping-pong is every bit as fun as actually playing it.

Will you have your family together this holiday season? What does your family do about those who can't make it home? Do you celebrate on a different date? Skype? Just curious....