Jul 29 2008
The Slacker Police
It’s been a long day of thunder, lightning, and rain with a side of showers. So me and the kids were…per the standard this summer…slacking. Hard.
Occasionally my dearest husband gets into these moods where witnessing the varying vegetative states of his children will drive him into a motivational frenzy. The TV gets shut off, the lectures ensue, and everyone starts doing the headless chicken dance looking for something productive to occupy their time. For me it was abandoning my computer and heading to the boys room to…gulp…clean out their drawers…and…their closet…and…one of their two toyboxes.
I was reluctant. I was overwhelmed. I was afraid.
My kids accumulate ALOT of crap. I don’t even know how it happens, there’s just stuff everywhere, like maybe while we sleep their junk is just multiplying itself exponentially. I just want to go in there with a bulldozer and tear everything out, just leave the walls and mattresses and burn everything else in a fabulous bonfire.
There are moments too when I hesitated. For example a couple of Christmases ago my 5 year old got something called T-Rex mountain as a gift. T-Rex mountain is one of those toys you should never give to people whose friendship you value, it should be up there with Play-Doh and Lego’s and permanent markers. It’s a contraption of rocky panels and plastic crevices and fossilized bone attachments, that are supposed to fit together to form this impressive mountain with a roaring dino head at its apex. My son was NEVER able to put this thing together. EVER. It was constantly falling apart at the slightest provocation. So that it was always in a dismantled heap in the corner of the room, until my son would beg me to rebuild it, during which time he’d get tired of watching me grunt like a neanderthal and walk away. I didn’t want to part with it though, because it was a big gift from a beloved family member and…I don’t know it came in a nice box.
Today I took the plunge. I dumped T-Rex mountain in a plastic garbage bag headed for the local Goodwill. Along with two other big bags of toys, stuffed animals, and outgrown clothes.
It was work, lemme tell you, on a day when manual labor was not in my forecast. That deserves a toot.
So does my husband, for forcing me into manual labor…the cad.
