The Manning Boys

I grew up as an only child. I have older half-brothers and a sister from my parents previous marriages but they never lived with us so I was pretty much alone. Although, one of my brothers did spend a year with us and felt it was his duty to inflict as many noogies and wedgies as he could to make up for lost time, I never really experienced growing up with siblings.

Then I met the Mannings. There are six Manning boys. Shane, Shaun, Scot, Stuart, Stein and Sloan and they each have the middle name of David. I guess their parents were too exhausted from trying to think of new, creative “S” names. There were times when their mom, Bethany, would get so made at one of them that she would begin to stutter. “Sh…Sha…Sc…Sss…St….St….JUST GET OUT OF HERE!!!!

There was always something going on at the Manning home. Backyard baseball with a tennis ball (hits into the pond were a ground rule double), video games, board games, chemistry experiments (Bethany’s still wondering how her boiling pot got that hole in the bottom) or just plain ‘ol gooffen off.

There was the time we were in the kitchen and I was observing a pretty intense game of “Risk” between Shane and Scot while Bethany was just finishing the dishes from the evening meal. Stu comes in late from baseball practice and begins fussing and fuming about not getting to eat and how hungry he is and it not being fair that food was not waiting for him when he walked in the door. Well, Bethany had had enough. After a day full of cooking, cleaning, umpteen loads of laundry, the general chaos of having a house full of boys around, dishes, and a mysterious charred hole in the bottom of her pot, Mount Saint Bethany was about to blow.
She never said a word.
In one quick, deft, Steven Seagal type move, she hurls the fork she was washing right at Stuie’s head and “THWONK” sticks it tongs first into the drywall one inch to the left of Stu’s eyeball.
Silence.
“I’ll just make myself a sandwich”, Stuart says in a rather contrite voice.
Bethany never said a word. Just turned back to the sink and finished washing the dishes. Shane, Scot and I looked at each other with eyes as big as saucers. “So”, Shane says to Scot, “How many armies do you want to move to Mexico?”
Just another day in the Manning house.