3 Girls Alone for the First Time

We have three daughters, who are now 49, 48 and 47.  This morning I was remembering the first time we left them alone without a babysitter, thinking they would be safe by themselves…as long as they didn’t get into a fight.  As it turned out, they were safe because they were occupied in a cooperative effort to play tricks on us.

When we arrived home that evening, all was well in the downstairs of the house…not so much upstairs.  We lived in an old Victorian home with a long hall running down the center of the upstairs.  On each side of the hall, there were 2 bedrooms with a bathroom in between.  An additional room had a door into both the master bedroom and the hall.  This created a fun maze for children to run through and play hide and seek.  Being too old for such games, the three decided on another one.  They took balls of yarn and strung them in and out and through the rooms of the upstairs and the hall creating a tangled and impassable web.  But, that was only the beginning.

After making it successfully into our room, we turned on the light switch and were greeted with blaring music.  They had unplugged the lamp which was on the switch and plugged in a tape recorder with the volume as loud as it would go.

Although this was all amusing, I kept a straight face until I got into the bathroom.  The fuzzy cover for the toilet seat was in the tub and was soaking wet.  When I asked why, I got the following explanation.  They had decided that if they put the lid of the toilet up and covered the actual seat with the fuzzy cover, one of us (probably me) would come in to use the toilet, lift the seat thinking it was the lid, and try to sit down expecting the seat to be there, when in fact, it was only the ceramic bowl.  They pictured me falling in.  However, after they considered this, they thought it would only work if the room was dark, so they decided to unscrew the light bulb that was on the switch.  They couldn’t reach it…so forgetting what they had already set up…Laura attempted to stand on the toilet seat and fell feet first into the toilet bowl.  Thus, the soaking wet cover which they tossed in the tub.  Picturing Laura falling feet first into the toilet was too much for me to keep the straight face…I howled with laughter.

They were quite pleased with themselves, especially since they knew they had one more prank we had not yet found.  When we tried to crawl in the bed that night, we discovered they had “short-sheeted” the bed.

Working together on the project had kept them from fighting while we were gone.  I laughed then, and I’m smiling thinking about it now.