Words I never want to hear again:
“It’s a haunted house, Mama! We even made bloody fingers for snacks!”
What’s all this, you say? How I wish I knew. The best I can gather: some grand entrepreneurial idea, courtesy of the always-wants-to-make-money 8-year-old.
All I know is that I went to my bathroom for five minutes (okay, I was hiding in there longer than that. You just have to understand. It’s been SO LONG since I’ve gone to the bathroom without someone coming to comment on what color my panties are or pointing out the fact that I have no penis that I guess I just sort of got carried away. I didn’t even dare to wonder why no one was following me in. They were just waiting for their opportunity. And I took it. And this is what happened.)
When I came back downstairs I found a little shop of horrors. Let me just take you on a tour of this creation my sons somehow, remarkably, envisioned and turned into reality in record time.
These are bloody fingers. They’re not really fingers, of course. They’re just chopped up bananas, which was probably the closest thing to fingers the boys could find. On top of them you’ll find honey, jam and peanut butter. Yum.
This delightful snack is provided for the people who “visit our haunted house,” because my boys are good at hospitality.
This is…the obstacle course? The wannabe tent? The seating area that isn’t really a seating area? Your guess is as good as mine. Even after they explained that “people would crawl through this and we’d be waiting on the other side to scare them,” I don’t quite get how that could be scary. Mostly because I tried, and all they did was giggle the whole time, because I could hardly get my butt through the legs of the piano bench. The scariest part about it was considering how I was possibly going to explain to my husband that I needed help peeling a piano bench off my backside.
Here we have “The room where ghosts knocked down all the chairs.” Which I suppose could be pretty freaky, especially if those ghosts are 3-year-old twins and an 8-month-old baby. Remember the twins in The Shining? Kids are the creepiest. (Also, I’m pretty sure the bloody fingers must have splattered on the floor at some point when they were making them. Hence, the splatters you see beside the chair with a booster seat. Most definitely not blood, unless strawberry goodness flows through the veins of one of my kids. In which case I need to put a tap in that, because we go through a jar of jam every week.)
This is the “Haunting minion,” which I laughed about until I stepped into the bathroom and they turned out the lights and the toy started talking. This toy has never talked. I mean, it did, but its batteries ran out months ago, and if you’re a good parent you never replace the batteries in any battery-powered toy, because keeping your sanity is paramount, and you’re really doing it for their own good.
They almost had to pull me off the floor after that.
Then they took me up the stairs, made me close my eyes and showed me this:
I’m pretty sure I passed out for a minute, because I still suffer from post-traumatic stress every time I’m going down the stairs from that one time I fell down our stairs and nearly died.
I love how creative my boys can be, and I love that their little minds thought up something as elaborate as this haunted house, but we had to close up the little shop of horrors soon after they took me through it, because it was time for dinner and we needed the chairs. They were disappointed they didn’t make any money off the haunted house, but I explained to them that there are easier ways to make money that don’t require so much setup for very little payoff. I don’t think they were interested in hearing it.
Next time they have a grand entrepreneurial idea, I’m going to insist on seeing a business plan before the activation stage.
