| We
are home from vacation. We had the best time ever! I have already bored nearly
everyone I know with the (many, many, many) pictures we took, so I won't give
you all the details, but, with the exception of one unplanned night in Dallas,
everything was great!
We got home smack dab in the middle of a school
day. We opened the door and paused. We could hear the clock on the mantle ticking
along and the fridge humming, but nothing else. We set our suitcases down and
looked around. The living room looked fine. There was a thin layer of dust, but
it had been a week. There was a basket of unfolded laundry, but it was clean unfolded
laundry. We sighed a little sigh of relief. We had both professed confidence in
the kids' survival skills, but I think that both my husband and I had separately
harbored some secret doubts.
We walked into the dining room. The table was clear, the floor was clean, the
mail was stacked neatly on the buffet. My husband began to sort through the mail
while I went into the kitchen. One of the cats streaked out of the room past me,
with nary a howdy-doo. The counter tops sparkled. You could tell what color the
floor was. The toaster was out, but the bread and butter were put away. The dishes
in the dishwasher were clean. I felt a chill run up my spine and the hair on my
arms stood up. Fear began to nibble at my subconscious and the remains of my Dallas
bagel rolled uneasily in my belly.
And
then I noticed it, and sighed a mother's sigh of relief. There on the exhaust
hood of the stove was a little plastic boot of the type worn by little plastic
Barbie boyfriends. Whew! My eyes continued up. I noticed some tiny glistening
brown splashes on the cabinet door above the stove hood and some others on the
ceiling. I began to smile. Everything was okay. My boys had not been held captive
in their own home all week by some neat freak. The neighbors had not banded together
and had them forcibly lobotomised in our absence. Everything was okay.
Now that the first rush of panic was over I was able to make a calm survey for
other clues. There in the trash basket was the cardboard from a roll of duct tape.
In the dumpster outside, under a week's worth of taco wrappers and chow mein cans,
I found several soda bottle lids and lots and lots of Mentos candy wrappers. I
knew with relative certainty what had happened. I could make an educated guess.
The cats had my sympathy.
We may never know the exact time line or the
precise sequence of events. But my husband and I are not fools. We have been parents
for a while and before that we were children. The boys were good, very good, for
some period of time. Perhaps it was for hours or maybe even days. But at some
point the pressure began to build. They got tired of eating when they wanted and
staying up later than they should. They realized that it wasn't that much fun
trying to finish your homework during breakfast. Being home alone began to get
a little dull. One of them, and we will never know which, thought of a way to
have some fun.
And when you cut away all the clutter, what is more fun
to a boy than explosives? Nothing. There is nothing more fun. One of them made
a suggestion involving soda pop and Mentos and another one of them embellished
it. Strap on an old G.I. Joe. YeeHaw! Let the games begin.
I'm sure they
each blamed the other when their improvised rocket blew in the kitchen before
they could get it outside. I am sure that there were some strong words spoken.
I imagine that the fact that the kitchen was now dripping soda pop foam from every
surface dampened their enthusiasm for a minute or two. Before they decided to
go into the backyard and try again.
We can guess that their second rocket
was so successful that they tried a third and a fourth and we can suppose that
they learned that soda is easier to clean up before it dries on every surface
of a kitchen than after. And we can guess that there is a bootless and probably
traumatized G.I. Joe in somebody's backyard wondering what the heck could possibly
happen to him next. |
