The Land of Broken Toys and Mismatched Socks

At any given moment in time, you could walk into my house and there's a good probability that it's going to look like a normal, lived in house. But if you take a second and look deeper, do you know what you'll find? That EVERY DAMNED THING in my house IS BROKEN in some way, shape, or form. I kid you not. It's the land of misfit socks, dead batteries, and broken toys.

Now to be honest, this bugs the shit out of me. It makes me crazy. I was one of those anal retentive, put everything back in its normal spot, keep things in their protective wrappers kind of kids. And I brought it with me to adulthood. I don't like you messing with my crap if you aren't going to treat my crap like I would: Like it's the most precious commodity on Earth. Yeah, yeah, so it sounds like I'm spoiled. I might be, but I really don't think so. I just think that it shouldn't be hard to have nice things.

Kids don't EVER think this.

In fact, I'm pretty sure MY kids think the opposite of this. It very well might be that my kids are thinking, "I wonder how quickly I can break this toy? Hmm, looks pretty sturdy. I might have to do some work to get the job done." They have one of those Terminator like computer scanner brains that calculates how long it can take to do irreparable damage to whatever hunk of plastic is their current "favorite" toy. Of course, once it's broken, tears and tyranny ensue. (Tears on their part, tyranny as I tell them I am not buying a new one.)

But it's not limited to THEIR crap that they break either. Community property items get caught in the crossfire all the time. Like the bathroom medicine cabinet door, which now doesn't shut all the way after having 2 young kids hanging off it trying to see themselves in the mirror. Or the freshly repaired and painted living room wall that has a door knob dent because one of my wonderful children swung the door so hard it totally disregarded the door stopper and slammed into the wall. I asked which child that did it and it was NotME again. That child is some serious need of an ass blistering for what he's doing in our house!

Every once in awhile, when I get really ambitious, I go through and do a thorough cleaning of the kid's rooms. It's always the same: Junk papers on the dresser, crap shoved under their bed, and a toy box graveyard full of broken junk. I cannot go through the toy box graveyard whilst my lovely children are home however, lest they start their pissing and moaning about me throwing out even one single molecule of their stuff. Never mind the fact that it's bent and crusty from the dog chewing on it or that the parts that go with it have been missing since 7 minutes after it was taken out of the box. Kids form unnatural attachments to their toys and don't understand why that have to throw it out, even after you've explained 12 times that they haven't played with it in 3 years. Sometimes you have to compromise and just keep that item another couple of years just to placate them, hoping by the time you try again to get rid of it, that a new hunk of plastic has taken its place.

So if you have kids, and have worn blinders when looking around at broken wii nunchucks that you spent $40 apiece on and parts of their birthday toy that they HAD TO HAVE, know that I can sympathize. But one day, when they're all gone and things are unbroken and nice, we'll probably miss their slimy, sticky, whiny behavior. At least that's what everyone keeps telling me. I'm pretty sure if NotME lived in their house, they might change their mind.