Uno with the Bollschweiler's

Uno has always been a beloved game in my family. It comes from the Bollschweiler (my mom's) side. They tell of a time when my mom was passing cards between her toes in order to cheat. They are all a bunch of cheaters. And no one, not one person, is worse than my grandma. She looks sweet and innocent and has the, "Oh, did I do that wrong?" expression down to a T. But we all know better.

We are playing in the dining room. Across the hall and down the hall there are two babies sleeping trying to sleep. No one in this house knows how to whisper and when the game is getting heated, as it always does, we only get louder. I won three hands in a row and then they were determined to unseat me.

The worst part is that Uncle Allen and myself are the only ones quick enough to play our hands and keep an eye on Mistress Cheater - Grandma - and when we are arguing among ourselves over a disputed move, Grandma manages to slip two or five cards in to the pile.

She looks so innocent, but she's a horrible cheater!

Poor Kevin, a friend of my cousin's, claims to be from a family of cheaters, but was hardly able to keep track of Grandma and his own hand. He's just as loud as the rest of us, though, so he fit in perfectly.

We play Uno with the "matching" rules; things get insane when we try to add the "Armstrong" rules into the mix (trade hands on 0 and slap the deck on 9). The game goes by a lot faster with our rules than it does in an ordinary game, and honestly, I don't think I can sit through a boring old Uno game anymore.

I love this family.