Same Mold Story

Dinner at the Parker house is Meatloaf Monday again, and nobody is excited. Camilla has sculpted her portion into a tiny Leaning Tower of Pisa, and when Mom asks for honest opinions, the kids admit the family is in a rut - the same meals every week, no vacations, and meanwhile the Joneses just got a boat. Eva points out that vacations and boats are expensive, and the last family camping trip ended in rain, cold, and bugs. David tells the kids that when he was young, he and his brother Dan made their own fun: snowed in for three days by a blizzard, they invented a game called broomball, played with brooms and a plastic container they named the Tupper Puck.

After dinner the whole family tries Broomball 2.0, complete with gloriously silly homemade rules - bonus points for hitting the ceiling fan, penalties that involve hopping on one foot or standing on your head. The game gets rowdier than David and Dan ever were, and Matthew dives for the Tupper Puck and smashes a hole right through the living room wall. Inside the wall is something worse than a hole: mold. Lots of it. Red Hollard inspects the damage and declares there's "more mold in that wall than Santa Claus has facial hair." A slow leak has been rotting the wall for years, the whole thing must be replaced, and the house needs fumigating. The Parkers have to move out immediately, for at least a week.

There isn't room for everyone in one place, so the family splits up. David and Eva take Dr. Graham's guest room, Olivia and Camilla stay with Wooton and Penny Bassett, and Matthew goes to Nana's apartment.

At first the kids think they've hit the jackpot. The Bassetts' fruit-themed guest room has strawberry and watermelon scented pillows - Olivia says it's "like living in a jar of jam" - and Penny is in a pizza-making phase, promising all the pizza they can eat. Matthew looks forward to a week of the sugar, soda, and late nights Nana serves up on sleepovers.

Reality arrives fast. Nana Lucia explains that a week-long stay is nothing like a sleepover: Matthew gets structure, just as her own children did - chores, vegetables, high-fiber dinners like lentil soup and black bean brownies, and helping with her salon business by giving ladies warm paraffin wax hand dips. Instead of the finale of Underwater Spies, evenings mean Spanish-language game shows, crossword puzzles, and ladies' bridge night, where Matthew is assigned the position of "dummy" and the ladies drink coffee and complain about young people these days. Meanwhile, the girls discover that keeping busy with Wooton and Penny is exhausting: they get flattened assisting at peewee roller derby practice, face pottery club, kickboxing, and upcoming bull riding lessons, and eat pizza at every single meal - breakfast pizza with mini donuts, tuna-eggplant pizza, even banana-bacon dessert pizza. Olivia tells Matthew that staying with Wooton and Penny is like sucking helium from a balloon - hilarious at first, then you just want to pass out. All three kids admit they miss Mom, Dad, and even Meatloaf Monday.

They walk to Dr. Graham's house to surprise their parents, but no one answers the door, and the backyard gate is locked. From outside they overhear Mom and Dad on the back deck, savoring the peace and quiet, calling it like their pre-kid years, and remembering an old dream of sailing around South America someday. When David jokes that maybe the mold cleanup will take two weeks instead of one, the heartbroken kids slip away before hearing another word.

Convinced their parents can't wait to be rid of them, the kids decide to prove the family is better together than apart. Their plan: surprise Mom and Dad by setting up the family tent in their own backyard for a camping trip - the very thing Mom has been begging them to do for months. But when Matthew searches the shed, the tent is gone, and Penny mentions she saw it listed - and already sold - on the Odyssey online garage sale. To the kids, it's proof their parents have given up on family memories entirely. Desperate, they write a signed manifesto promising to stop complaining, quit fighting, keep their rooms clean, and even eat sushi once a month, and they march to Dr. Graham's with Camilla in her cutest pigtails.

The plan collapses in the best possible way: Mom and Dad were just about to call and invite them over. When the kids confess to eavesdropping, David and Eva explain that they left too soon. The rest of that conversation was about all the wonderful family memories over the years, how fast the kids are growing up, and how the parents don't want to miss a moment of this stage - they want to make the most of the time God has given them. And the tent? They sold it because they bought a bigger, better one that doesn't leak and has two whole rooms. Camilla immediately asks if they can try it out that very night in their own backyard, and everyone agrees.

That evening the reunited Parkers roast marshmallows under the stars - until Red Hollard appears in the yard to announce that the marshmallows are on fire and, better yet, the fumigation is finished early: the family can move back home right away. Everyone loyally insists they'd rather stay outside for family time, though Matthew does mention ice cream and Eva remembers her early morning. Then Camilla finds the perfect compromise: they can camp on the living room floor instead. As the family happily hauls everything inside, Olivia sums up the whole week: "I love our family."