by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
April Fools’ Day is always a fun time in our home. I live with a bunch of pranksters, which means they keep me on my toes all day. No one is safe this day—not even Mama.
Every year, I painstakingly contemplate what kind of tricks I’d like to play on my kids. Here are some I considered this year:
1. Steal their underwear.
I imagine this prank would go something like this:
Me: Are you missing anything today?
Him: No.
Me: Nothing?
Him: No.
Me: How long has it been since you changed your underwear?
Him: I don’t know.
I doubt he (and by he, I mean any one of my kids, take your pick) would even notice, without my explaining to him what I’d done, so I skipped this one. Maybe in a couple of years, when he actually cares about how he smells.
2. Hide their shoes in random places.
The problem with this little idea is that my kids don’t really need any help with losing their shoes. They leave them in odd places and accomplish this little trick on their own—every morning, without fail.
3. Stuff all their socks inside one lucky sock.
One of the 5-year-olds does this on a regular basis, so I don’t think they would really appreciate my work on this one. Why waste all that time?
When I asked them what they use this monster sock for, they said “Hitting each other.” Of course. They call it a sock bomb.
4. Pretend the hot water got turned off for the one who actually cares about taking a shower.
I feel like that would discourage him from taking a shower, though, and we definitely don’t need that. Boys aren’t exactly the most hygienic people around.
5. Turn all their clothes inside out.
Oh, wait. This happens every laundry day, because that’s how they put it in the dirty clothes hampers, and I don’t have time to turn it all the right way.
6. Replace their morning milk with buttermilk.
My dad did this to me when I was 6. How many people can remember memories from when they were 6?
Exactly. It was traumatic. I took this one off the table.
7. Tell them they don’t have school today.
This would have been really fun, except that April Fools’ Day was on a Sunday. Also, I imagine that when the day falls on a school day and if I actually executed this prank, there would be some messy cleanup when they find out it’s a joke. And by messy cleanup, I mean lots and lots and lots of whining.
8. Tell them it’s “dress like a Dr. Seuss character” at church today.
This one I actually managed. I wish I had a picture to show you, but I was too busy laughing.
I’m glad we can have a house that embraces pranks.
But now that I can’t find my left running shoe and there’s a stick-bouquet hiding under my covers and someone switched out my favorite soap with hand sanitizer, I’ve realized that I’m really good at dishing it out—but not so great at taking it.
Mom was right all along. Imagine that.
(Photo by Charles Deluvio 🇵🇭🇨🇦 on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
You know what one of my favorite things about living with children is?
Missing things.
The other day I was stirring a pot of mashed potatoes, and I laid down the spatula and went to dig in the freezer for some broccoli I could lay out on a cookie sheet and pour olive oil over and roast in the oven. And then I went to stir the potatoes again, because they were boiling great white foam over the sides of the stainless pot, and my wooden spoon was gone.
None of the boys were around. I hadn’t heard anyone come inside or go out. I searched high and low, thinking maybe it had fallen on the floor and I just couldn’t see it because I had some unexplainable spoon-shaped blind spot. There aren’t many places a bamboo spoon can hide. It wasn’t on the floor. I crawled on my hands and knees, just to be sure. So I gave up and took out the metal spoon, which was probably a better one to use anyway. Oh, well. Not a big deal. I probably hadn’t stirred them in the first place.
I drained the potatoes and unwrapped the butter to melt in them and shook out some salt and hooked up the mixer so I could make them nice and smooth, and then I called the boys in for dinner.
You’ll never guess what happened. One of those 3-year-old twins came traipsing in with the very bamboo spoon I remembered stirring the potatoes with, like I hadn’t been using it first. He must have sent a ninja to do his dirty work, because when he’s trying to steal books from the home library after lights out, his footfalls are so thunderous they resemble a herd of elephants fleeing whatever makes elephants run. I heard nothing this time around.
If it hadn’t been so maddening, I would have been a little bit impressed.
I can’t keep a house tidy, because boys keep swiping my stuff. They’re like practiced thieves when it comes to things like wire whisks and flashlight batteries and the last of the flour in the freezer. The other day, I found a metal nut cracker upstairs in their room, because they “wanted to see what happened when you use it on a bouncy ball” (sadly, the ball is no longer with us). I will find perfectly good table spoons out in the backyard, because they “wanted to see how long it would take to dig to the earth’s mantle using a silver spoon” (You never actually get there, because there’s too much limestone in our soil. And it would take twelve hundred years.). I will find random things in the freezer, because someone wanted to know “what would happen to a glass mixing bowl when you fill it with water and put an old banana in the middle of it and freeze it.”
Tell me, please, how it’s remotely possible to keep a clean and tidy house when you don’t even know where half your possessions are? The 8-year-old has broken into our bedroom while both of us were occupied by boys downstairs and stolen paperclips, because he wanted to clip all his papers together, and by the time we found him, he had a string of a hundred paperclips already wrapped around each other, because, in his words, when he looked at that paperclip in just the right way, he realized that he could string them all together and that would make a really cool decoration for his room, which he plans to put…
On the floor.
Boys use forks to try to dig out rocks, no matter how many times you tell them to keep what’s inside inside (and no matter how many times you almost curse because you just stuck a prong up your nose while the rest went in your mouth, where they’re supposed to go). They will use butter knives to carve boxes into houses and leave the knives on the table instead of putting them back away so the next time we need to spread butter or jam on something, there’s no utensil left that will work. They will use baby spoons to pretend that their stuffed animals are eating something tasty, and when you need to feed the real live baby in your house, those three metal spoons have disappeared into the black hole of a 5-year-old’s room.
And the most annoying part of it all is that you won’t even know those things are missing until you finally need them, which for some things is a relatively long time. I didn’t notice the foil was gone until I had a dish, months later, that didn’t have a lid, and I needed to use it to cover our leftovers. And when I asked the boys if they had seen the 500-foot roll of foil anywhere, the 8-year-old brought it back downstairs and said he’d been using it to “make a person out of a toilet paper roll.”
There are so many things that disappear in a house with children, and they will not turn up until you’re kneeling down on the floor and that missing object comes out to maul you in some way. You will not realize your serving spoon went missing until you sit on the couch and you suddenly have bamboo up your bunghole. And then you’ll wonder who in the world managed to lodge a spoon down the crack of the couch (and now in another crack) when they’re not even allowed to eat in this room, and you’ll never know, because they’re too busy laughing at how it’s perfectly wedged between your cheeks and you’re, honestly, too busy trying to get it out and, after that, trying to walk back to the sink, because it may be easy to recover from an injury like that one when you’re 8, but it’s much harder when you’re 30.
So, in a way, it’s actually pretty hazardous to live with children, because they’re always setting up traps for you. And I would be willing to bet they really like doing it, because it’s pretty funny to see a mom limping around after stubbing her toe on a metal bowl that was hiding under a blanket she kicked in her frustration because it shouldn’t have been on the floor, yet again. I guess it is pretty funny. I guess I can at least give them that.
But I cannot give them permission to use my household utensils for God knows what. I will have to draw my line there, because those are things I need. Seriously, kids. Stop trying to pretend your lunch containers are doggie bowls for your stuffed animals. If you want a lunch tomorrow at school, curb your creativity a little. I promise you’ll find plenty of other supplies elsewhere, if you’ll just get out of my kitchen.
This is an excerpt from The Life-Changing Madness of Tidying Up After Children, the second book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by Jarosław Ceborski on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents, Wing Chair Musings featured
I don’t know if I’ve ever faced a harder challenge in my parenting years than raising twins.
Maybe it’s because our twins came near the end of the line of boys and they see all their older brothers do, and they expect that life will be exactly like that for them.
Except there are two of them.
Oh, you want to drink out of a big-boy cup because your older brother did it when he was 2? I’m sorry. There are two of you. You want to sit free at the table instead of strapped into your chairs because all your brothers did it when they were almost 3? I’m sorry. There are two of you. What? You want me to leave the baby gate on your door open because you haven’t yet figured out how to climb over it (it’s coming)? I’m sorry. In case you haven’t noticed, THERE ARE TWO OF YOU.
Our twins are identical, two sides of the same egg. Nature’s gift, doctors say. One is left-handed, one is right-handed. They complete each other.
That’s part of the problem. What one doesn’t think of, the other does. What one is afraid to do, the other will try. It’s like having four toddler wrecking balls walking around the house, scheming about what they can destroy next. I imagine their conversations go a little something like this:
Twin 1: Hey. Hey, brother. Mama’s not watching. Remember how she told us not to touch this computer? She’ll never know if we do. Where is she?
Twin 2: She’s in the bathroom. Remember what we did last time she was in the bathroom?
Twin 1: Oh, man. That was fun. But back to this computer. She’ll never know. I just can’t figure out how to open it.
Twin 2: Like this. But how do you turn it on?
Twin 1: Easy. I’ve seen Daddy press this button right here.
Twin 2: There it is.
[Mama comes back into the room with the baby she just changed.]
Twin 1: Close it, close it, close it!
Twin 2: Walk away. Not too fast, not too slow. Just enough to look like we weren’t doing anything. And make sure you wear the wide eyes. She thinks they’re cute.
I love my twins. Of course I do. It’s just that they were completely unexpected.
If I could have read a primer two years ago, this is what it might have said: Every parent of twins needs…
1. An extra dose of patience.
You will need this for many things. You will need it for the stranger at the store who asks to see your amazing bundles of joy and, after looking at their angelic sleeping faces, declares she “always wanted twins” and you want to say, “Oh, really? Then take mine,” because one was up screaming at 3 a.m. and as soon as you got him calmed down two hours later the other one woke up screaming, and as soon as you got that one calmed down an hour later all the other boys were up asking for breakfast. Which woke up the twins, who were also hungry. Again.
You will need this extra dose of patience for when they learn to talk and there are so.many.words and so.many.whys and so many demands for everything under the sun. You will need it for the potty training and the big-boy-bed transitions and the constant fighting from dawn until dusk.
You will need it for the times you were helping one out of his pajamas and into his day clothes and you return back downstairs to find all the jackets removed from your poetry books and spread across the living room floor like a special carpet for toddler feet, for the six thousandth time (You should probably just put those books away, Mama. Far, far away.).
2. Good decision-making skills.
These will come into play those times they both wake up at 3 a.m. because they’re hungry. Which one do you feed first? (Answer: You’ll figure out a way to feed both.)
You’ll need these skills when one twin is in the downstairs bathroom playing with a plunger in a potty you specifically remember your older boy didn’t flush five minutes ago when he stunk it up and the other is in his bathroom upstairs finger painting the mirror with a whole tube of eco-friendly toothpaste. Which do you get first? (Answer: The toilet one. Toothpaste is much easier to clean than the mess an overzealous plunger in a pile of poo can make.)
You’ll need them when the one who’s known for wandering does exactly that, moves from his nap time place while you take a minute or five for a shower, because it’s been four days since the last one, and you walk out to find him playing with the computer he’s been told 50 billion times to leave alone and, in his panic to close it, he deletes the 1,500 words you wrote this morning before kids got up. What do you do? (Answer: Cry.)
3. A rigorous workout regimen.
When one is running down the street because someone forgot to lock the deadbolt he can’t reach and another is going out back without shoes in 26-degree rain, you’ll want to be in tip-top shape for that. I recommend interval training. That way when they stop and change directions, you’ll be ready. You’ve done this a thousand times. Ski jumps. Football runs. All-out sprints.
When they slip, unnoticed (because they’re like ninjas), into the playroom while you’re wiping down the table after a ridiculously messy lunch, and both of them come out with their scooters, you’ll want to be able to wrestle those “cooters” from screaming, flailing bodies without hurting anyone.
And when one collapses in the middle of the park because it’s time to go and he’s not ready yet and the other thinks that just might work, you’ll need strong arms to carry thirty-two pounds of kicking and screaming twins back to the car, one tucked under each armpit.
4. Containment measures.
This would be things like strollers until they’re 3 and booster seats until they’re 4 and a baby gate on their door until they’re…15. Well, maybe 13.
It also means leashes at the city zoo on a packed day, even though you said you’d never use them and you can feel the disapproval of other people and you want to say, “Come talk to me when you have 2-year-old twins. These things have saved their lives 17 billion times, and that was before we even got out of the parking lot.”
Containment saves lives. And sanity.
Twins are great. And hard. And maddening. And great. And so hard.
They can disassemble an 8-year-old’s room of LEGO Star Wars ships in 3.1 seconds. They can disassemble a heart with one identical smile and a valiant try at saying “Uptown funk you up” that sounds like it should have come with a bleep.
There’s just nothing like them in the world. You’ll be so glad you get to be their mama.
Especially after they fall asleep.
This is an excerpt from Parenthood: Has Anyone Seen My Sanity?, the first book in the Crash Test Parents humor series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by Helen Montoya Photography.)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
My boys are fortunate to have two sets of grandparents who live in Texas. Their grandparents every now and then offer to keep them, in shifts, for the weekend, and they’ll take our boys all sorts of fun places and load them with sugar and feed them all the foods they’re not allowed to have in our house. They’ll let them stay up too late and deal with their whininess the next morning and effectively dismantle the schedule we sent them as a suggestion and then, two days later, hand them back to us with their eyes twitching.
“Here,” they’ll say. “You can have them back now.”
“You don’t want them for a couple more days?” we’ll say hopefully.
“Maybe next time,” they’ll say.
And we know there won’t be more days next time, because you know what? Raising six boys (even watching them for a couple of days) is really hard work.
On the way home from picking the kids up from the grandparents, the kids will typically tell us, in halting and never-ending fashion, about all the awesome food they had, which had sugar counts I don’t really want to know, and then they will, without even taking a breath, move on to all the fun things they did, like going to play golf and watching a movie every single night and swimming in a pool and swinging on a tire swing or digging in the huge dirt piles in their grandparents’ front yard and sleeping in their clothes instead of their pajamas and taking a bath all by themselves and having donuts for breakfast and going out to eat pizza and wearing their brother’s clothes instead of their own because grandparents don’t usually check labels and so don’t see that this crop-top belongs to the 3-year-old and not the 6-year-old.
Usually, while the boys are gone, Husband and I will work hard to clean up our house, which means that when we get home, the boys walk into a perfectly tidy, perfectly ordered house. Two minutes (or fewer) later, they will pull out all the stacks of artwork they did at their grandparents’ house and scatter the papers all over the floor because they think we surely want to see it all, even though it’s nothing new that we haven’t already seen. They’ll ask for dinner and go raid the fridge when we answer that it’ll be coming soon, and then they’ll have their first meltdown because there’s nothing good to eat in this house—at least nothing that compares to Lucky Charms and donuts and McDonalds and anything else that makes me sick just thinking about.
After this meltdown, they’ll progress into talking about how we’re the worst parents ever, because we never let them watch a movie or stay up too late or have donuts for breakfast, and we start going out of our minds trying to follow behind them and fix all the things they’re destroying as they’re walking around bemoaning the state of their life. We’d really like to start Monday with a clean house, but kids would really like to take that possibility and rip it into tiny little pieces we can’t see anymore.
We’ll move into the unpacking mode, splitting the shift where one of us unpacks and the other cooks dinner, but you’ll notice that both of these jobs leave few eyes to watch the melting down, tornado-like children. Dinner will be the worst dinner they’ve ever tasted, baths will be the worst time they’ve ever had in the bath, bed time will be the worst thing they’ve ever experienced in all their lives, and by the time the evening is finished, we will be the Worst Parents Ever.
There is definitely a detox time when it comes to handing off children to grandparents and then taking them back. We will have to detox their food expectations, their sleep expectations, their complete and utter lack of routine. We will probably be driven near out of our minds in the process. This adjustment period makes life feel like it will never be the same again. But eventually it will even out. And I will eventually be thankful that we took a weekend away and the boys got to have an opportunity to spend time with their grandparents for a couple of days.
On the surface, it might seem that the only reason a parent would want to send kids away with grandparents is to get a break themselves. And this is definitely one of the great perks of grandparent weekends. Husband and I have used our weekends to talk and actually finish a sentence. We’ve used them to cook dinners together that no one will complain about (although we usually have enough leftovers for an army, because we don’t know how to cook for two people anymore). We’ve used them to reconnect, dream, work, sightsee, and share a cup of coffee without a kid climbing on our laps (that’s not to say I don’t thoroughly enjoy my kids climbing onto my lap. I do. It hardly ever happens anymore, because no one ever wants to sit still anymore).
But what grandparent weekends also do is give two completely different generations an opportunity to get to know each other. Grandparents don’t have the burden of discipline like they did when they were raising their own children. They get to be fun. They get to be doting. They get to be the rule relaxers. This keeps them young—it’s been proven by science. Grandparents who take an active role in their grandchildren’s lives have sharper brains, more capable bodies, and greater heart health. (Keep that in mind, Mom.)
And kids get to experience their own benefits. It’s important that kids interact with another generation that is removed from their parents’ generation, because they can learn important things from their wisdom (like how you actually should wear deodorant when you turn ten). Kids get to experience the unconditional love of a grandparent who is not quite as concerned as their parents are over who they might turn out to be—because time has given grandparents perspective, and they know that everything irons out eventually. Kids get to be kids without someone continuously harping on them about picking up their dirty socks.
So while I start to dread the hand-off from a Grandparents Weekend about halfway into that freedom, I’m glad every single time that we sent the kids away perfectly calm and controlled and pick them back up crazy little wildings who forget what it means to brush their teeth and put away their clothes and do such things as after-dinner chores. I’m glad, because I know it’s all for everyone’s good.
My kids are currently climbing up the walls with their toe-knuckles. I’m currently scheduling the next Grandparents Weekend.
This is an excerpt from This Life With Boys, the third book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by This is Now Photography.)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
It never fails: by the time we get to Spring Break, my kids are done with school.
They’re done with homework, done with getting dressed, done with packing up in a timely manner. And, honestly, I’m so done with making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches they’ve become just jelly sandwiches.
The other morning, one of my school-aged sons came downstairs in his pajamas. I thought maybe he’d forgotten today was a school day.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Going to school,” he said.
“You forgot to change,” I said.
“No?” he said, like he wasn’t quite sure. He looked down at his pajamas. “This is what I’m wearing.”
“You can’t wear pajamas to school,” I said. “Sorry.”
He groaned all the way up the stairs.
The school morning routine has become complicated.
I tell the 11-year-old to get up (multiple times), and he will still act like I’m the worst mom ever (for not getting him up) when I suddenly call out that it’s time to go (he didn’t hear me the twelve times I said it was time to get up). He hasn’t eaten breakfast, and he was supposed to take a shower this morning. I think it’s all an act. He’s allergic to showers; I think it’s been…well, you don’t want to know how long since the last shower I know about.
There’s so much chaos in the kitchen they have to yell to be heard. The other morning one of them was trying to tell me something, and it was so loud that I leaned close and said, “Say it in my ear. Maybe that will help.”
Not only did he say it, but he also sprayed it, and I got to both smell the delightful breath and wear the fragrant spit of a boy who hadn’t yet brushed his teeth this morning.
They can never find their shoes. The shoes are right in front of their eyes. They could trip over them and still not see them.
Maybe they’re just afternoon people, instead of morning people.
Several of them have forgotten what school mornings even look like (it’s usually the ones who have been doing this routine for several years); they immediately head into the LEGO room, rather than sitting down at the table or packing up their folders or attempting to tie their shoes.
Most mornings, one of them is running to catch up on the walk to school, and it’s not a silent catching up, it’s a whining—usually a scream-whining—one. My favorite.
On a typical morning, when I get back home, I see that someone forgot to close the back door and all our air conditioning has filtered out into the great wide world because that surely helps bring the Texas temperature down.
I didn’t know until I became a parent that March madness was actually a thing.
I’ve stopped signing folders, I get notes about overdue library books, I don’t even enforce homework anymore. Guess I’m ready for summer, too.
Wait. No. I take that back. I’m not ready for summer at all.
But it’s coming at me like a comet. Ready or not.
(Photo by This is Now Photography.)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
Tidying experts say that, among many other amazing things, you can gain confidence from the tidying up of your home. I agree. But I think we may be talking about two different things, because the confidence I believe can be gained from trying to tidy your house when children live in it is this:
You will fail at lesser things.
You will fail, one day, at beating your 8-year-old son at chess, because he’s in a club and you were never all that great at it, anyway, even though you tell yourself you used to be super smart. It was probably all a ruse.
You will fail at a cutting your boys’ hair the one time you try, because you were too cheap to pay the nominal fee you’d pay for a little boy’s haircut, and they’ll end up looking like a bowl sat on their heads while you chopped away.
You will fail at finding your keys when the kids have just used them to unlock the playroom, which is not really a playroom anymore but has become an obstacle course, a massive junk drawer, a “Hazard—Keep Out” kind of place. It didn’t used to be, but then you canceled your storage space, with the intention of cleaning out everything in it. Everything in it ended up in your garage, or playroom. But back to the keys. When your kids used them, they fell somewhere in this obstacle course of a room. Too bad you don’t have a location device on them. You’re probably never going to leave the house again.
You will fail at keeping up with school papers.
You will fail at remaining cool as your kid begins to care about cool. It doesn’t matter how many books you write or how many full-length albums you produce or how many beautiful art pieces you paint in the clip of a year. You are totally uncool, Mom and Dad.
You will fail at finishing those cloth napkins you planned to make for them when they all went off to kindergarten. And, at the same time, you will fail at finishing the crocheted blanket you were supposed to make for his sixth birthday and the other one you were supposed to make for the baby on his first birthday, because there’s just no time left. All your time is spent hanging out with the kids. That’s what you’ll tell yourself. It’s really spent signing school folders.
You will fail at kicking a ball past the little boy who now runs faster than you do, mostly because you have two 3-year-old cling-ons hanging to your leg, because this is how they said it would be a fair game of kickball.
You will fail at trying to learn how to roller blade when you turn 30.
You will fail at finishing that book in the time you thought you’d finish it, because boys make it nearly impossible to read.
You will fail at making your bed every morning.
You will fail at cooking a breakfast of fried eggs and pancakes, because there’s just not enough time, and, besides, they don’t want to wait that long.
You will fail at remembering whether the dishwasher was already run.
You will fail at hanging up laundry the day you wash it.
You will fail at shelving books every night, because by the time all the kids are down in bed, you have just enough energy to crawl to your bed and lie down.
You will fail at keeping your bedroom door closed any night, because at least one of the children will come knocking with something of emergency proportions, even if it’s just to tell you what their fart smelled like. Or that they love you. Both equally important.
You will fail at keeping even one puzzle with all the puzzle pieces.
You will fail at making sure the game of Operation doesn’t have any pieces missing.
You will fail at finding a full and complete deck of cards anywhere in your house.
You will fail at keeping toothpaste off the counters of their bathroom.
You will fail at keeping a toilet to yourself, because there’s always a time when they’re talking to you and they have to go right this minute, even though their toilet is only fifteen steps away.
You will fail at recycling those boxes before your kids see them and decide they want to make new toys out of them, and most of the time you’ll be glad that they’re so creative.
You will fail at keeping your plants alive and healthy.
You will fail at remembering to water your plants (sorry plants).
You will fail at cooking a perfect grilled cheese sandwich, because when your back was turned, your ears picked up on some suspicious splashing in the bathroom, and you know that sound, you know it well, so you investigated, and, sure enough, it was your 3-year-old, trying to plunge the toilet, even though he’s been told a billion times to keep his hands off.
You will fail at remembering that things you said you could never forget. (What was it again? You have no idea.)
You will fail at trying not to make the sex talk with your kids awkward. It will always be awkward. Embrace awkward.
You will fail at keeping up with the lawn outside, because boys are constantly digging holes, and who has the time to cut grass when you’re just trying to reduce the mayhem that crops up in your house?
You will fail at trying to stay the same. Because when you’re a parent, your kids are constantly, day by day, hour by hour, shaping who you become—and who you become is better.
So, really, what failing at keeping a tidy house really affords you is the confidence that you will fail at many, many other things, and that you will be better, greater, stronger for your failing.
Bring it on.
This is an excerpt from The Life-Changing Madness of Tidying Up After Children, the second book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by This is Now Photography.)
