My parents live in a new house. It’s beautiful, but my kids tried their best to change that this summer. In our first week there, my seven-year-old twins gouged several walls, wrote on my parents’ RV (just in dust, thankfully), and broke a banister.
Technically, Vivian and William didn’t break the whole banister: just a bracket that connected one of the railings to the wall (see Item 2, above). I was skipping downstairs when I noticed it.
“Dad?” I called. “One of the brackets is broken. Pretty sure it was Vivian and William swinging on the railings.”
Dad came to inspect.
“Sorry,” I added.
Mom looked down the stairwell, giving me a reassuring smile.
“Hmm,” Dad said, not overly concerned. “I’ll get a new bracket tomorrow.”
I made conversation. “The ones at the farm must have been much stronger. I swung on those railings all the time.”
Dad looked at me. “I replaced those brackets all the time.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” he said.
“That was you?” my mom asked. “We always blamed Steve.”
I climbed the stairs, more cautiously than normal. Dad followed.
“W-well,” I stuttered, trying to cover my tracks, “it was likely him too. He was a lot bigger.” It’d been a decade or two since I’d been able to blame my brother for something. “He is 6’4”,” I added, in case they didn’t know.
My mom smiled. My dad shook his head.
I continued. I have this tendency to over-explain things when I get into a quandary. “Well, I liked to challenge myself. If I used the railings to help me, I could make it up the stairs in three bounds and down in two.”
By this point, my parents were laughing. It’s not often they see their adult daughter backpedaling, making excuses for her behaviour twenty-some years ago.
“Uh. Sorry about that.”
What have you (had) broken?
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Confirming your brother’s size for his parents was a smooth step. Hope W & V were taking notes.
I think W & V had their noses two inches from the TV. They needed new glasses.
It’s time like these where we should look to Jonathan Swifts “A Modest Proposal”, where he implores us to eat babies and other young children for sustenance. Then you won’t have any trouble!
I haven’t read that since college. I loved Swift!
As an only child, I never got into those kind of fixes. I think I missed out.
True. But no one ever blamed you needlessly either…
I don’t care what the twins break when they are here, as long as it isn’t my heart!!!
<3
that is SO sweet. I grew up with grandparents where children were “seen but not heard”. One time I made the mistake of picking up the crocheted doll my nanna used to hide the toilet paper rolls (lol just thinking about it!!) and got a deep scolding. Good on you grandma for loving those children and letting them be kids – because they sure aren’t for very long!
Kids know how to break a house in properly. 🙂
Cute post.
Thanks, Annie. This is why my house is still all beige. With marks on it. Well, that, and the fact I’m lazy.
“I have this tendency to over-explain things when I get into a quandary.”
Um totally.
And can’t wait for Whiteboard Wednesdays to return!
Hmm. “Um totally” because you do this a lot? Or “Um totally” because you see me doing this a lot?
😉
Awesome.
I had three siblings to pool into blame. My parents pretty much just blanket-punished us.
Your parents are brilliant.
I just broke two necklaces…and I just handed them off to my dad to fix last weekend.
That sounds like my dad. He has fat, muscular fingers from years of farming and he can still fix tiny necklaces.
Love this! Nothing like the truth finally coming out…all those years later. 🙂
I know. Only now, we had a beer and a crib game to laugh at it.
On our recent visit, my mom baby-proofed the house. For her eight-year-old grandson.
Can I send your mom my twins for a bit?
I admit this with a head hanging in shame…
But when we were children? My sister and I never met a toilet we didn’t plug.
Every family member knew to have a plunger handy when we came to visit.
Oh yeah.
Sexy.
LOL. But funny is sexy. So you are!
My kids break everything. They’re like a two person wrecking crew. Thank god grandparents love them so much!
Indeed. And they must love us to if they let us bring them over.
Real love would be grandparents who’ll let us leave the kids with them and let us go off on our own for a while. 🙂
I once ripped a big whole in one of my mother’s tablecloths and tried to say my brother did it, but I was found out. I also use to cut the hair off my barbies and hide the hair in my mom’s dept. store catalogs, which isn’t creepy at all. And my brother and I buried my sister’s Ken doll in the garden; she still doesn’t know that.
Looks like Vivian and William are having a fantastic summer!
Jess, that’s hilarious. Sounds like it might be a scene in a Stephen King book…
Well, at least we know where your kids get it from. Obviously this destructive gene is genetic. 🙂
I once broke my brother’s nose when I threw a remote at him. Does that count? Unfortunately I could NOT blame that on my brother, having only the one. I blamed everything else on him though. He was younger. And a brat. He deserved it.
How hilarious is that (now, looking back). I can actually picture the remote sailing through the living room air.
One time I broke the antenna off my parents wood-paneled station wagon and used it as an Epee. When my parents found out I blamed it on my best friend Dwight. My parents told me to go get him, so I pretended to walk to his house and returned 10 minutes later saying he wasn’t home. In that meantime, my folks had called and Dwight had been sick for a week – a fact that my 9-year old brain forgot. There was never a rod my parents sparred, so needless to say I don’t remember much after that…
Oooo. Ouch. Being busted (literally) for a lie sucks. I think blaming others is often an instinct…
It is. My 3 yo answers “Siddharth (her brother) did it” to any question that sounds like “Who did this?” She doesnt even wait to see what it is I am asking about.
The part about blaming your brother is laugh out loud stuff. I’ve broken plenty. One time it was a light on the neighbor’s station wagon. Not a happy memory.
Yes, it’s always better to brake your family’s things rather than your neighbour’s. That’s my philosophy, at least. Of course, it helps that I had no neighbours growing up.
We used to build tents in our room. This consisted of hanging sheets off furniture ledges. We generally secured them with heavy objects but one day our engineering skills failed us and we were buried in yards of cloth. When we arose from our cottony grave, we found our mother standing at the door with a broken crucifix in her hand. It had been hanging on the wall over the dresser and we had no idea how it managed to find its way to the ground. Worse, mom was CRYING!
My mother never raised a hand to us but my father had no trouble applying sound beatings. We knew we were doomed. For some reason there was never a reckoning. The cross was mendend and rehung before my father stepped foot in the door that evening. This was unprecedented. We were certain Jesus had intervened on our behalf. Mom didn’t have to remind us to say bedtime prayers for the next month (just as she’d planned). ;}
What a story, Teresa! Seriously. Well told, too.
I suspect many mothers have magically resolved similar situations. 🙂
I keep wondering if my parents’ house was built better than mine because my house is thrashed and I didn’t destroy much growing up. I wish I could take my kids to the Connecticut house, stay there for a week and see if it really is as strong as I remember. Wonder what the current owners would feel about it.
I’m a big over-explainer too…. lol
My daughter did a handstand on her bed, slipped (naturally) and stuck her foot (feet?) through the wall. We hung a picture over it.
Jodi
This is too funny! Too be honest, it was my brother who did the damage. He plowed a bucketful of hockey pucks through the new drywall in the rec room, in a fit of rage. Later, he lit fire to the same room because my mum wouldn’t buy him a new hockey stick.
I just “borrowed” stuff: my mum’s clothes, my dad’s razor, a tank full of gas, my mum’s last cigarette.
Nowadays, the Reds (read: Luke) are the ones breaking things: Luke is particularly enamoured of the the keyboard of my dad’s laptop. Mostly, he like to flick the letters OFF, which has so far cost my dad $80 to fix.
Matthew, on the other hand, often climbs into his carseat at the end of a visit with things he has “borrowed” – Papa’s water bottle, a fishing rod from the shed, hair mousse from Nanny’s cupboard, batteries and mints from the junk drawer…
Huh. Seems the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Good thing I broke ’em in years ago!
My best friend since I was 4 is still, three decades later, a little afraid of my mom, and here’s why… She turned up at our house one day with the magic that is Silly Putty. My mom sternly admonished, “Do NOT get that in the carpet.” My mom can be pretty scary. So what did we do? Got it in the carpet. Then cut out the evidence with scissors. Luckily, it was the height of variegated pile-length 70s design carpet and my mom never knew. But my friend still brings it up about once a year or so.
My mom’s car: I ran over a really, really big rock. And once on top of it, hearing the crunching of metal and not knowing why I was so far up in the air, I sped up to dismount.
Going home was one of the scariest things I’ve ever had to do.
Thankfully, my mom was filled with grace that day….
I was boring, didn’t wreck much – left that to the brother who flooded the house (more than once…) and the (same) brother who nearly burnt it down hiding in the attic smoking. Although now, years later, mom tells me the reason all her tupperware has our last name on it is because I always lost things. She sent me a couple sandwich containers and it’s always a little embarrassing to use them at work “hey Niki, you afraid someone’s going to steal your sandwich?” sigh. I’d still probably forget them if it wasn’t for our last name written, albeit faded, in permanent marker.