H ~ hoppa = hop

God morgon, klass!

Welcome back! I trust you enjoyed your day off with friends and family and that you're refreshed and ready to dig in again. Today's word is a very important word. It's hoppa. Pronounced: h + O as in Oprah + po(w). Or another way is like cuppa, as in I'd like a cup of ... only you're southern and you're Dolly Parton and your explaining the cuppa cake to Olympia Dukakis. Cuppa -c + h. You still with me? You did see Steel Magnolias, right? If you didn't, you'll have to go with the Oprah thing.

Hoppa means to hop. As in on one foot, or onto a train, over a puddle, or a over a fence and into a closed pool to go skinny dipping. (Not that your teacher would know anything about that...but I do have a search function, waaay down at the bottom of my blog. In case you're interested in stories of that nature.) Where was I? Oh yeah, then when you need to explain to the officer what you're doing, you'll have one word, hoppa, to help you. Good luck.

Seriously now, of all the h words available, I chose this one because it's attached to a special memory with my sister. When we visited Farmor and Farfar during the summer, they always gave us their double bed, and slept on a pull-out bed in the den. Their bed was a bit hard to sleep in for us, because of course we didn't just go to sleep. We told stories and giggled and moved around, and pretty soon the bed was in complete disarray.

It had a strange kind of arrangement where on top of a VERY firm mattress there were two-inch thick pads. You made your bed on and around those pads. Swedes don't have fitted, elastic sheets for the bottom. They only have flat sheets. So as you can imagine, if you're goofing around at all, these flat pads slide everywhere. So we invented this method of kinda putting things back in order by grabbing onto the pad, and then doing a sort of froggy-hop thing. Hop, during split second in air, pull pad closer to desired position. Land. You do this over and over again, with lots of giggles.

This picture is from 1975, so it's not one from one of our teenage solo visits.This picture is from the trip the first summer after our move to the US, so I'm 10 and she's 7. It's also an example of that thing I was telling you about: Farmor always buying us the same clothes.  That's her in the picture with us, and those dolls are the ones that lived at her house.  She made sure that we had everything we might ever need so that we would visit often.  Of course we did.  I just couldn't find pictures of us from that time. But I figured out why. My mom is the paparazzi, and she wasn't with us. Farfar took good pictures, but they're all slides.  

Sorry I got longwinded today.  Guess I had a lot to say since there was no post yesterday!  Do you have a special sibling memory you'd like to share?  Did you get tortured, um, blessed with matching clothes?  Have you ever froggy hopped?  I'm dying to know  ;-)