As I was dusting my coffee table today, I took a long, hard look at the scratches, gashes, and gouges that it bore from doing battle with my children. And I came to (finally) understand that as long as a parent has children that live in the same house as the parent; the parent will NEVER have anything nice!
Now I love all four of my kids with all that is in me, but damn, they sure can tear up stuff faster than I can replace it. From taking my tools to dig up earth worms, to spray painting the brick retaining wall outside my house, there literally seems to be no end in sight. I understand now why my Dad used to get so angry when my brother and I used his tools for “exploring”. (I have become my father)
So as I continued dusting the battle-weary coffee table, I thought I might put together a list, a “top 10” list as it were, of reasons why parents will never have nice things as long as the kids are around. So here we go….
10. If you, as a parent, have a flat vertical surface in or around your home, your children will find that 6-year-old can of spray paint that you used to re-do the patio furniture and proceed to paint their names in 500-font letters on said flat vertical surface. You would think that Leonardo DiVinci himself painted it.
9. It is a virtual guarantee that once you have finished cleaning your garage/workshop that your little angels will locate the saw dust from a recent home improvement project and scatter the saw dust all over creation; which includes your recently cleaned garage/workshop.
8. If you are fortunate enough to have a teenage daughter residing in your home, you will notice that when she uses your wife’s $200 flat iron, that she either forgets to unplug it, or leaves it lying on the bathroom sink, causing nice marks that are the same color of the flat iron. (In my case; purple) You will also find that there’s not an industrial strength cleaner powerful enough to remove these marks. Kind of like permanent skid marks.
7. Your amazingly bright children will also very likely use the inside panel of the car door to close said door, instead of the handle that was placed on the door by General Motors for the sole purpose of closing the rear car door. This will cause the door panel to be summarily ripped from its foundation, never to return to proper working order again.
6. As the little blessings from heaven are playing hide-and-seek inside the house, they will climb over, and eventually break the supports that are in the furniture. Please not that you will not realize this until the attempt to lean back in the broken chair. They will also very likely tear doors out of the wall in which they were nailed with a pneumatic nail gun with no less than 200 pounds per square inch of pressure.
5. With the precision and accuracy of Ty Pennington, your children will proceed to staple various random items to solid oak furniture for no good reason. This task will likely be performed by your youngest child, and won’t be discovered until your wife finds the “artwork” the following day while picking up the clothes that your children left on the floor from the previous night.
4. While practicing good oral hygiene, your children will, without thought, completely miss their toothbrush with the toothpaste and squarely hit the wall, toilet, sink, shower curtain, faucet; nearly everything in the bathroom except their toothbrush. Bless ‘em Lord.
3. These fearless hunters, in order to secure some tasty venison, will concoct the most foul-smelling, God-awful, mess that has ever been seen or described. It will consist of deer bait, syrup, saltine crackers, and an unidentifiable meaty substance. They will then hide the compound in a cardboard box in the closet of their respective rooms so that, heaven forbid, a deer doesn’t sneak into our humble abode and steal it.
2. In order to unearth treasures long ago hidden by Mother Nature, your children will undoubtedly use your only (and best) hammer to pound the rock-hard red clay in your back yard. Of course the only thing that they will locate underneath the soil will be good ol’ limestone. Bye-bye hammer; hello Home Depot.
1. Last, but certainly not least of all, your precious babies will place their grimy hands all over any window that they detect has been cleaned within the past two days. This will include car windows, storm door windows, mirrors of any and all shapes, and of course, computer screens.
