Officially, "Unofficially Engaged"

My brother Eric is going to get married! Unofficially. Until like, tomorrow or something. What you don't always bargain for with a large family is how and when information gets disbursed. Let me create a visual if you will. Picture an ocean that feeds into larger rivers and those rivers feed into smaller lakes and streams. Following that analogy, my mom would be the ocean. Large quantities of information go from her to us kids. Very orderly and systematic. Except of course when the ocean gets busy, forgets who has been told, or the streams start talking amongst each other.
So what usually ensues is a phone, text, email scramble to figure out what the heck is going on, when it happend and who's involved. It's not always pretty and with 7 kids you're always going to get one that was inadvertantly left out of the loop. You know who that person is when you talk about something, everyone is agreeing and nodding and then suddenly you hear someone say, "Huh? What?! When was this?" (We usually take that moment to all unfairly look over at the "ocean") Some infamous out-of-the-loop Anderson family moments range from:

Will finding out Stephanie was pregnant about 6 months in and only then because we were talking about it. Will: "Steph's pregnant?" Whoops.

To...

Eric calling me on the phone: "Hey Mel, where are you?"
Me: "I'm in Texas, where are you?" (Said with a little bit of "uh, duh!" in my voice)
Eric: "Well, i'm in Texas too!"
Me: "What? You're home from school? When? How? Nobody told me!"
(Eric hollering for Mom in the background)

To the shameful...

Eric came home from school about 2 months after the family cat had gotten out and gone missing. A couple days into his visit, Eric: "Hey, where's Crookshanks?"

So the fact that we all know Eric is almost engaged goes to show we are growing and getting better at the information train right? Wait, the anology was with water...oh well, you get it. Congrats Eric, we love you and are so happy for you!