by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
Husband and I have been eagerly awaiting the time when we will be able to leave our sons at home without parental supervision. The oldest just turned ten, but I’m thinking this rite of passage is still quite a way off. The other day, when he offered to watch his brothers for half an hour so Husband and I could go for a quick walk and I asked him what he would do with his brothers if we took him up on his offer, he said, “I’ll just lock the twins in their room and then no one else is really a problem.”
Clearly he doesn’t understand what “babysitting” means.
He’s a fairly responsible kid, but he’s not all that observant. If his attention is stolen by anything—a bird in the backyard that he wants to identify, an idea that he has to act on right this very minute, a really good book—then the entire rest of the world is left to its own devices. He becomes efficiently and completely immersed in his own world.
The thought of having some time away while this son watches his brothers is very tempting. We don’t get many date nights. And this kid is the one who once told my mother that he wished he could figure out how to clone Husband and me so that one set of us could watch him and his brothers while the other set got to go out on a date. He knows we’re starved for dates and time alone, and he’s sweet enough to care.
Still, I’m too smart to sign off on Temporary Head of Household just yet.
The problem isn’t really him, either. The problem is that all six of my children are BOYS. Husband had a brother. I’ve heard insane stories about what brothers do together, and this does not help my son’s case at all. My sister’s husband had a brother, and his stories are even worse than Husband’s. What their stories tell me (and what I know to be true already) is that the things boys do are impulsive and careless and, I hate to say—I really do—stupid. Every now and then Husband, my brother, or my brothers-in-law will provide me with a glimpse of the little boys who still live inside them.
Take the Fourth of July in 2011, for example. These fine grown men of my family—all of them fathers, mind you—decided that year that they would drop some cash on fireworks—but instead of setting the fireworks off at night, they would do it during the day, using a PVC pipe as a homemade bazooka. This ended almost as badly as you might imagine—a fire started in the field behind our home. Thankfully, my stepdad, at the time, was a volunteer firefighter, and he managed to get it under control before anybody else knew of their prank. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him move that fast before, and I’ve known him since I was twelve.
This is exactly what leads me to believe that it’s quite possible I will never be able to leave my sons home alone.
Recently I asked this question on social media: What age is old enough for children to stay home alone? I got a variety of answers. None of my friends had a definitive one, because it’s really up to the parents and the kids. I know this. I remember staying home alone when I was eight, my brother was nine, and my little sister was five—but I was an old woman trapped in a child’s body. Also, there was only one boy.
Here’s what I imagine would happen to my house if my sons stayed home alone for any amount of time:
1. Someone would surely get hurt.
This is because someone would most likely decide to do something ridiculous, like climb to the top of the deck covering, which isn’t as high as the roof, and jump off with a trash bag they still think can make them fly; that someone might break his leg. Or someone would decide it might be fun to sword fight with butcher knives, since Mama and Daddy have always forbidden it and they’re the worst parents ever and only want kids to not have any fun; this someone might have his nose lobbed off. Or someone else would try to walk on the roof with their roller blades strapped to their feet because the slope of it makes the perfect ramp. That someone might break every bone in his body.
Boys think they’re invincible. Especially when they’re alone with no parent to talk any sense into them.
2. All the food would vanish.
When my sons are home, the most frequent phrase I repeat, besides, “You’ve already asked that question and I’ve already answered it,” is, “Get out of the refrigerator.” I suspect that as soon as Husband and I were to walk out of sight or drive away (one day), our boys would immediately open up the fridge and binge on the rest of whatever’s there.
We’d likely either come home to a completely empty refrigerator or a bunch of boys in prone positions complaining their stomachs hurt because they ate ten pounds of bananas on a dare or they found my hidden chocolate reserves or they drank a whole gallon of milk to see who could drink it the fastest without puking out their insides—which is what the boys in my church youth group used to do for fun on the weekends. They always did it at night, when their milk vomit practically glowed in the dark. Night or day, it was still stupid.
You’ll notice a recurring theme here.
3. They’d fight and one would threaten to run away—and actually accomplish it.
Since this happens often when Husband and I are home, I imagine that the same would happen if we were away for any length of time. The missing variable is Parent, but if there’s a Substitute Parent, I foresee it still being a problem.
And my sons don’t just threaten to run away: they do.
We live in a relatively safe neighborhood, and they have friends living all around it, so when they say they’ll run away, they’ll usually just go hang out at a friend’s house up at the top of the cul-de-sac. They’re easy enough to find; I let them have their momentary victory while observing their imagined escape.
But when a brother is in charge, he would probably not be quite so inclined to watch and “find” his missing brother, since the impetus to running away was the fight they just had. Brother In Charge despises Brother Who Ran.
The problem is not so neatly resolved.
4. Something terrible would befall the house.
Everywhere my sons go in my house, they leave their marks behind. There are fingerprints on windows and holes in the walls and ski marks on the carpet (don’t ask). One of them the other day “accidentally” slammed the back door too hard, and a picture frame fell off the wall and shattered at his feet. He was shocked to know that he had such power.
Boys, as any parent knows, don’t think about the fact that if they climb onto a bookshelf full of books, it might actually fall over (if it’s not bolted to the wall—and sometimes even then). If they try to stack two chairs on top of each other, even when the makeshift “stool” is propped against a wall, they will still fall and, for their efforts, punch a new hole in the wall. If they try to do a pull-up on the open cabinet, that cabinet will rip from its hinges.
They don’t think about what they’re doing until there’s a gaping hollow in the door where they thought it would be funny to kick it closed. They don’t think about what they’re doing until there’s a shower curtain bent in two, because they wanted to see if it could actually support their weight. They don’t think about what they’re doing until the mirror is shattered in front of them because they thought it would be funny to throw a metal car at it.
Without parents at home, all my house’s protection vanishes.
If my sons were left alone, the chance that they would do something stupid and irresponsible increases, by default, by about one thousand percent.
Everybody knows that boys need the loving hand of a wise parent to keep them from doing something reckless. They only have the capacity to consider how cool the idea would be. You want to see what it would be like to jump from the roof to the trampoline? I’m game. You want to ride a skateboard down the stairs? Yep. Me too. You want to set off firecrackers from a PVC pipe? Let’s do it.
What could possibly go wrong?
Every now and then, my ten-year-old will try again. He’ll tell us to go ahead and go out on a date. He’ll take care of his brothers—for a price (ten dollars. He has a cheap going rate). We thank him for his kindness and consideration and politely decline for now.
And, possibly, forever (but I really hope not).
This is an excerpt from If These Walls Could Talk,the fifth book of humor essays in the Crash Test Parents series.
(Photo by Stephen Radford on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
Everywhere I look—at least on the Internet—I see perfect parenting. There is proof of perfect parents on parenting blogs, forums, social media threads, anything that shines a light on the brilliance that is a parent who never fails to discipline, never wants to give up, never needs help, and always approaches their responsibility with perfect patience, perfect follow-through, perfect methodology.
On the other side of this spectrum, there is me.
I’ve been called an abomination to motherhood; an inexperienced, ugly mother of future criminals; and a helicopter parent, a permissive parent, a controlling parent, a no-control parent, a too-structured parent, a lackadaisical parent, a cares-too-little parent, and a cares-too-much parent (I should get an award for achieving every polar opposite there is in the parenting world). I’ve been told it’s a shame I have so many children to release into society when I am clearly so ridiculously inept at this motherhood thing. I’ve been told I should suck it up, get off my backside, and do society a favor so my kids are actually decent human beings.
People are astonishingly kind nowadays.
The Perfect Parents Club is a relatively difficult club to join. It doesn’t have any dues, but it does have some requirements, which include but are not limited to the following:
1. Memory loss.
When Perfect Parents say something like, “My kid never did anything like that,” you can rest assured that they are most likely suffering from memory loss. There is not a child on the planet who has not ever thrown some kind of temper tantrum (however wild or mild it may be), because every child has a mind of his or her own, and at some point in time, what a parent wants is going to come into direct conflict with what a child wants. It’s the thrill and magic of being human, of being completely different people with different ideas and different expectations. If a kid never talked back or asserted himself or herself, then there are bigger problems at stake. It means a kid is either afraid to state his or her opinions or they are so effectively brainwashed that they have no opinion at all.
I’d rather take the alternative: a kid who knows who he is and what he wants.
Fortunately, most parents who say “my kid never did that” are usually only suffering from a simple, reversible case of Memory Loss.
2. Denial.
Perfect Parents also must have a good grasp on denial when they read a story about a parent whose daughter refused to wear a certain color because of some inane reason known only to three-year-olds, because this is the exact right time when they must declare, with full conviction: “I would never have allowed my child to do that.” In this case, it’s not that our Perfect Parent has forgotten all the nonsensical things their kid ever did or said; it’s that their memories have been overlaid with a good film of Denial.
They never would have let their kid dance in rain puddles when they were instructed not to dance in rain puddles, they never would have turned the other cheek when their kid snuck an extra carrot or two for snack time, they never would have carried a boneless kid home from a park—they would have made that boneless kid walk.
A healthy sense of denial helps Perfect Parents reframe memories with better memories of kids who did what they were told all the time, never sassed, and never embarrassed them in front of other people. In other words, with a good dose of denial, real kids can become Perfect Kids.
3. A loud voice of judgment.
Perfect Parents like to weigh in on things like discipline and boundaries because they’ve forgotten that every child is different and they believe, since their child was perfect thanks to faulty memories and denial filters, that every kid who doesn’t behave perfectly must be the product of bad parenting. Our morals are failing. Our discipline is lax. Our world is going up in smoke; have you seen the kids of today?
They express this opinion loudly, every opportunity they have, making sure they point back to their perfect parenting abilities. Which leads me to:
4. An inflated sense of parenting abilities.
Perfect Parents mistakenly believe that the reason their children behave or behaved perfectly (at least in their memories) is because of their stellar parenting abilities. Some people have it, some people don’t. Whatever. The ones who complain about their kids’ behavior problems—or who, in my case, make fun of them; even worse!—should step up their parenting game.
Perfect Parents are more than happy to tell other parents how they should raise their kids, because they clearly have it all figured out; they’re doing everything exactly right.
They forget that children are people and that some parts of this behavior game are just the luck of the draw. I have six kids. Four of them argue about everything—and I mean, literally, everything. Two of them do everything we ask. We are the same parents to all. I’ll let you figure that one out on your own, Perfect Parents, but here’s a little hint: It has more to do with the kids than you’d like to admit.
5. Unconsciousness.
One thing that could be said for all of us is that we are all Perfect Parents—when we’re unconscious. I’m a Perfect Parent between the hours of 9 p.m. and 4:15 a.m., otherwise known as the hours I’m sleeping. Unless, of course, one of them wakes up.
Before I had kids, I thought I might have a slim shot at being a Perfect Parent, but my first kid was a creative and gifted one. The second was a compliant social one, the third was hard-headed, and the fourth and fifth were twins. Any notion of perfect parenting flew out the window the first time my creative son, at two, negotiated his first contract for a small business.
And now, so that I will never forget how imperfect my parenting was and is, I keep detailed records.
Perfect Parents are a figment of the imagination. The rest of us—the imperfect ones—can all rest easy.
After all, I’d rather be real than imaginary.
This is an excerpt from Hills I’ll Probably Lie Down On, the fourth book of humor essays in the Crash Test Parents series.
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
One school morning, my third son woke up uncharacteristically cantankerous. This kid is generally like a grumpy bear in the mornings, but this particular morning he was more like a bear who’d been woken from hibernation three minutes before he was supposed to be woken. (I imagine that bear would be upset; I feel upset every time I wake up three minutes before my alarm goes off.)
He stalked around the house grumbling under his breath. I tried to listen, but I couldn’t quite make out anything of note. I assumed he’d feel better after breakfast, but he sat at the breakfast table and moped.
“Everything okay, baby?” I said.
He shook his head.
“Want to talk about it?”
He shook his head.
I try not to pry. I like to let them talk when they’re ready, but something was clearly bothering him, so I said, “You didn’t sleep all that well?” intending to utilize the process of elimination, which generally works for a seven-year-old.
“I slept just fine,” he said in decidedly snappy voice.
I cocked my head, squinted my eyes, stirred the oatmeal. Waited.
He said, “The tooth fairy didn’t leave me any money.” He held up something tiny. It was a tooth.
Oh, no.
I likely should have known, immediately, what was wrong; this is a standard happenstance in our home. Someone loses a tooth—someone is always losing a tooth, it seems—puts it under their pillow with high hopes for prosperity, and they wake up the next morning to nothing but the tooth.
The tooth fairy has been a bit flaky in our home.
Who would have ever thought the tooth fairy could be so complicated? I sure never did.
In our house, teeth fall out every other day (that’s a slight exaggeration—but only slight), but the tooth fairy very rarely visits.
There are a variety of reasons for this: She doesn’t carry cash, she’s much more forgetful than she used to be (she’s very old by now), and the tooth can’t always be found.
Husband and I always warn whichever boy has lost the tooth to leave it in a certain place where it will be easy to find when they go to bed and need to transfer it to the spot under their pillow. But the problem is that there is always an abundance of curious brothers manhandling that tooth with a bloody bit of root attached to it; they think it’s the most amazing thing. They don’t always remember to put it back where it was.
I’m convinced that someone in my house (certainly not the tooth fairy) has a tooth repository somewhere, and it likely looks like something out of a horror film. I haven’t found it yet, and I’m glad. Creepy kids.
The cost of teeth these days is incredible. It seems that inflation has ballooned the prize that kids expect to be waiting beneath their pillow when they wake after a visit from the tooth fairy. My sons come home talking about how the tooth fairy left twenty dollars under their friend’s pillow, and they’re all excited about this because they think it will happen to them, too. My poor kids don’t realize that there are different tooth fairies working the world and the tooth fairy assigned to our house does not leave twenty-dollar bills. She usually leaves an IOU—or nothing. So disappointing.
I’m pretty sure that some of my kids have prematurely stopped believing in the tooth fairy because of our shortcomings, but, well, what can you do. Parenting is hard even without all the required extras.
In the last four years, the tooth fairy assigned to our home has demonstrated some of her principles. You’ve already heard one of them: She doesn’t adjust much for inflation. Kids get five dollars for losing their first tooth (maybe) and a dollar every tooth after that. I’d say this is enough adjustment for inflation; I got a quarter for every tooth when I was a kid (and I tell my kids this every chance I get—they’re lucky). So even though a kid can’t buy much for a dollar, that’s as much as our tooth fairy will splurge. If my sons would actually save their dollars in a piggy bank or something, they’d have thirty-two dollars by the time it was all over.
The future, unfortunately, doesn’t mean that much to them yet.
The tooth fairy is also usually late. This is because she has a billion things going on in her house. She has kids she needs to send off to school, a house she needs to clean, clothes she needs to wash, work she needs to do, kids she needs to bathe and put down to bed, and, by the end of the evening, her brain and her body have been emptied out; not only does she not remember that someone lost a tooth, but she also has no energy left to lift herself from the bed, tiptoe down the hall, and slip a dollar underneath a pillow. Add to this exhaustion-complication the fact that the tooth fairy usually goes to bed before her older children do, so when would she sneak? True, she gets up at 4:15 every morning, but by that time she’s definitely forgotten that someone lost a tooth.
It really is a tragic circumstance.
When my sons wake on a morning after losing a tooth, they first check their pillow, to their great disappointment. They next come storming into our room or down the stairs, wherever Husband or I happen to be. They then posit that one of their brothers must have stolen the money the tooth fairy left under their pillow, because there was nothing this morning when they checked, after which Husband and I will exchange a look and one or the other of us will say, “She just added it to your allowance.”
“How much?” the boy will say.
We’ll shrug. “A dollar,” we’ll say.
If they complain, we remind them that the tooth fairy did say their daddy or I could take the dollar and use it for ourselves if the recipient was not grateful, after which they will zip their mouth closed and be, perhaps, marginally grateful for a dollar they didn’t have yesterday.
Husband and I don’t put too much pressure on ourselves to keep up this ruse; it is, after all, a ruse. One of these days our sons will know why the tooth fairy doesn’t always make it here on time. For now, we congratulate the son who’s lost a tooth, examine the one coming in, and bask in that adorable gap-toothed grin.
And, in the backs of our minds, we continue hoping that we never, ever stumble across that nightmare stash of lost teeth.
This is an excerpt from If These Walls Could Talk, the fifth book of humor essays in the Crash Test Parents series.
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
I had just picked up my sons from school, and we were trying to get everybody loaded in the car. I was in the middle of strapping the baby in his seat, when my second son, who stood behind me, made an innocent observation: “Mama, there’s a spider on you.”
For you to fully understand the significance and weight of this innocent observation, I must tell you that I am the daughter of a woman who used to beat spiders to death with a broom when she found them crawling anywhere—all while shrieking hysterically. I am a woman whose son once dropped a spider on my lap because he picked it up and thought it was cool, and I ran away screaming in the middle of a worship set at church. I am also a woman who has had a spider drop into my lap while I’m driving, and I nearly drove off a cliff.
So when my son said this, I immediately felt the fear make my legs grow warm and soft. Heat rushed over my chest.
“Get it off,” I said rather calmly. I was quite proud of my calm.
My son merely stood there looking at my back, so I thought maybe he was kidding. Boys are pranksters, after all. I shook my head, tried to still my fluttering heart, and said, “You shouldn’t joke like that.”
My third son, who was already in the back seat of our van, leaned over at that moment to look. “Oh, my goodness,” he said. “It’s white. It’s almost in your hair.”
Something about the way he said it told me he wasn’t kidding. This was not a joke.
It was not my finest moment. Imagine, if you will, a woman flailing in the middle of a sidewalk near an elementary school, trying desperately to swat the spider off her back—and then add about twenty percent more hilarity and ridiculousness. That was me. I finally slammed my back up against my van, bruised my shoulder blades, and finished off the spider—or so I hoped. My sons couldn’t tell me one way or another, and I felt it crawling up the back of my neck all the way home.
Husband checked to see if it was gone when I walked in the house. He didn’t see anything, and I’m hoping that’s enough.
Some people, when they see me out and about with all my sons, will occasionally say something to the effect of “You’re a lucky mom to have all these boys protecting you.” This is usually when I’m walking into Target with Batman, Spider-Man, and Yoda beside me because they didn’t want to take off their costumes and I didn’t have the energy for a fight. But you get used to hearing things like that when you’re the mom of boys.
The problem, however, is that my sons are just as afraid of creepy crawly things as I am. They see a bug they can’t identify, and they high-tail it out of there. A scorpion moves toward them on the floor, and, rather than smash it with the shoe that’s on their foot, they skedaddle. A bee once chased one of them, and he nearly ran through a wall trying to get away.
When you become the mom of a son, you imagine your sons standing by your side, swatting away things like spiders and scorpions and bees without even batting an eye. These are the boys who forget to drain the tub and leave the toilet seat up and don’t want to hang up their clothes. This protection is supposed to make all that worth it. I’m not supposed to even think about insects or arachnids or whatever might come crawling my way.
When we got home, there was another spider on the floor, large and black and heading straight for the ten-year-old’s stinky feet (though I can’t fathom why). He refused to kill it, saying it needed to be relocated—and yet, when we all wondered aloud who might do the relocating, he pointed right at me.
We argued about it until we looked again and the spider was gone.
The worst kind of spider, in my opinion, is the one you know is there but can’t see.
This is an excerpt from Hills I’ll Probably Lie Down On, the fourth book of humor essays in the Crash Test Parents series.
(Photo by Nicolas Picard on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
Husband and I have been trying, since the beginning of the year, to not only make our house and habits more environmentally friendly but also embrace the concept of minimalism.
Owning fewer things is a much simpler, more environmentally friendly way to live, because the fewer things we own, the fewer precious resources it takes to make them. We want our sons to know and understand that every possession they bring into their lives has an impact on others and the state of the earth.
This particular part of environmentalism—the minimalism part—is an ideal that has had our hearts for quite some time; I am the kind of person who feels anxious when surrounded by too much stuff. And kids come with so much stuff.
But now that my sons are out of their infant and toddler stage, which is one of the most crowded (as far as things, time, and, well, everything else), Husband and I thought this would be a good season to focus on minimizing even more.
My original plan was to finish minimizing the house within the year, but since we’re still only on the first room, I think that goal might be a little idealistic.
The problem is kids.
They want to be a part of this process—and they should be; this is their home, too. But they are also really terrible at getting rid of things.
I recently spent an entire day going through every bookshelf in our house—and there are many; we have a designated home library, a library in husband’s and my office area and at least two bookshelves in each kid’s room. It’s no wonder this process took all day. I was proud of my efforts when, at the end of the day, I’d cleared off the equivalent of four entire shelves and stacked books with broken bindings and missing pages in one pile and books we’d outgrown or never really enjoyed reading in another.
I was all ready to congratulate myself for minimizing one of the most difficult things for me to minimize—books—when my 12-year-old walked in the room.
“Oh, wow!” he said. “I love this book!” He picked up a book from the discard pile that was flapping from the first few pages because it long ago lost its cover. He started to leave.
“Uh . . . What are you doing?” I said, perhaps a little too aggressively.
“Taking this to my shelf,” he said.
“No, you’re not,” I said. I proceeded to explain to him what the piles were and why they were necessary—which was a huge mistake. He dropped down to his knees and started rifling through the discard pile and the donation pile, rendering them no longer piles at all, as kids do so well. I went to fetch Husband for help.
Husband was much more reasonable than I was; he let our son choose three books from whatever pile he wanted, so long as there was room on his personal bookshelves and the books didn’t end up on the floor.
It’s been story after story of this same kind of thing. And I understand how difficult it is for kids to get rid of anything. They don’t have the experience we have to say that ridding ourselves of one thing makes way for something better—or simply opens up space to breathe. But they will. They’ll notice the difference, and while they may not learn from the first thousand experiences of this kind, eventually they will learn. And they’ll remember it when they grow up and have homes and families of their own.
So I guess I’ll keep chipping away at the reduction, letting them exercise their negotiation skills, and enjoying the wide open space of owning fewer things—however fleeting it is.
(Photo by Samantha Gades on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
There’s a boy in my house who requires constant, relentless reminders, even though he’s ten. I’m well aware that things could change as time does its maturation work, but I suspect he may always have a tendency toward forgetfulness. That’s a prediction based primarily on one fact: he’s very much like his daddy.
Sometimes, when he’s talking, he will forget what he’s saying in the middle of a sentence, and, rather than try to figure out where he was going, he will contentedly leave it hanging unresolved for everyone else. We’re either falling asleep or riveted, and both end in jarring realizations: one that he’s finally finished (or is he?) and the other that we may never know what it was he meant to say. If we like neat and tidy endings, this will drive us crazy for at least an hour. Not that I know.
The other day this son came downstairs and said in a voice that could only be described as urgent with a little bit of panic on the side: “I really need you to sign my permission slip.”
“What permission slip?” I said.
“The one I brought home.”
“Where is it?”
He looked at me like I had tentacles growing out of my face. “I put it on the counter,” he said.
I looked at the counter, where, after a week of not sorting through papers brought home from school, had a Leaning Tower of Papers (there are a lot of them around our house).
“You’ll have to find it for me,” I said. “I don’t have time to do it.” (I had a squirming baby on my hip who was begging for food.)
It would have been easier if I’d just done it myself, because by the time he was finished looking for this permission slip, there was no tower in sight. There was only a paper counter. As in, a counter made of paper
I signed the permission slip, handed it to my son, and kissed him on the mouth, even though he now prefers the cheek. Half an hour later, I found that same permission slip on the table, along with his homework. I raced the permission slip up to the school but left the homework where it was. I’m willing to let him face the natural consequences of getting a fifty on his homework if he forgets it but not the natural consequences of missing a field trip because he left his permission slip at home.
I hardly ever see this kid’s school work, because he typically forgets it at school. He is the four-year recipient of the Grossest Lunch Box Ever, or he would be if such an award existed, because he forgets to bring it home most frequently and perpetually. He’s the kid with the most pairs of shoes out in the van because he forgets he was wearing any once we’re home from wherever we went.
He’s also the kid who most consistently leaves things out and, hence, misplaces them. He will peel off his skinny jeans because he doesn’t like how tight they are and I made him wear them for family pictures, and then, when it’s time for said family pictures, he won’t be able to find them. He will blame his brothers for stealing all his LEGO mini figures and then find them in a box in his room, where he put them before he left for school today so his brothers wouldn’t mess with them. He will misplace autobiographical journals and find them buried under a carpet of books in the library (I can’t be held responsible for reading misplaced journals. Just saying.).
He is the kid who brings home the most notes about missing homework, has the largest fine at the library, and needs the most plentiful number of socks. His organizational skills (or lack thereof) have cost us quite a bit of money and time over the years.
I think I might just have to get used to that.
He’s ten now. The other night we went to church, and he had to bring all his new LEGO mini figures inside with him, crammed into his pockets. We were at the church a little longer than anticipated, and because his mom gets a little anal about the proper amount of sleep, we were rushing to get out of the parking lot.
We were almost to the highway that takes us home when our son said, “Oh no!” in that panicked voice he reserves for Things That Are Lost Forever. I knew what he was going to say before he said it. “My mini figure!”
“We’ll be back on Sunday,” Husband said. “You can get it then.”
We crossed our fingers for a docile agreement.
But this boy happens to be our strong-willed boy, too, so what we got was the complete opposite: crying and raging and calling us the Worst Parents Ever for about fifteen miles down the road, and then, for the rest of the trip home, a series of blaming exercises, during which he invented elaborate stories about which brother had been responsible for the disappearance of this mini figure.
Half an hour later, we were home. He got out of the car and stuck his hand in his pocket—the why doesn’t matter; it’s the what that counts.
What did he find?
The missing mini figure. It had been there, in his pocket, all along.
He smiled sheepishly, apologized to everyone he’d blamed (which was everyone in the car), and said, with a nervous laugh, “Maybe I should check my pockets better next time.”
You think?
This is an excerpt from Hills I’ll Probably Lie Down On, the fourth book of humor essays in the Crash Test Parents series.
