Home Alone!

The first time we left our kids alone to “babysit” themselves, they were about eleven, twelve and thirteen.  Nate was not born yet, so I’m talking about Janelle, Laura and Michelle.  I don’t remember where Bill and I went, but we decided the girls were old enough to manage a couple of hours without getting into too much trouble.  Hmmm……

We arrived home and everything seemed to be OK on the first floor of the house, although the girls did seem to be especially gleeful.  On going upstairs, we discovered that the hallway had been turned into a tangled spider web of yarn strung between door knobs and light fixtures.  

When we went into our room and flipped on the light switch music began blaring.  They had plugged a tape recorder with the volume turned way up into the outlet which normally had a lamp plugged into it.   I kept my cool through all of this.  The monkey business had kept them busy all evening, so they hadn’t gotten into any serious trouble.

When I went into the bathroom, I noticed that the fuzzy cover from the toilet seat was on the floor in the corner and was obviously wet.  “What happened here?” I inquired.

It seems the girls had decided that if they put up the lid over the toilet, and placed the fuzzy cover on the seat instead of the lid, I would come in and not realize this, and when I went to sit down, I would fall butt first into the toilet.  The problem was that after they set this all up, they decided that it would work best if the room was dark, so they needed to unscrew the light bulbs over the sink.  They couldn’t reach the bulbs, so Laura without thinking about what they had just done, decided to stand on the toilet seat....and fell in feet first.

I totally lost it at this point.  The mental picture of her falling in was more than I could handle, and I burst out laughing.  So much for maintaining any serious ability to tell them not to pull such a stunt again.

Later trying to crawl into bed and finding that they had “short-sheeted” it was pretty anti-climactic.  I just started laughing all over again about Laura finding herself standing in the toilet. 

I am actually smiling right now as I think about it three decades later.