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| My Granddaughter, Juniper, Princess of Destruction |
I hate the holidays. Well, no, I don’t.
Not really. It’s my family I hate. No, I don’t hate my family, either; just the grand-kids. They’re evil. OK, not evil, but they’re definitely children, and in most circumstances, that amounts to the
same thing. Children = evil. It’s a simple equation.
They don’t mean to be evil any more than a hurricane means to knock your house over. Like any force of nature, they just
sort of happen. And during the holidays, they happen around my house.
See, the problem is I’m not set up for
kids. I have too much nice stuff, all the stuff I couldn’t have when my own
kids were little. Fragile, fancy-schmancy pieces of art, musical instruments, delicate
electronic junk … most of it placed in locations below three feet.
When the grandkids come over for
Thanksgiving – all 11 of them! – they home in on my stuff like hungry bees
circling a petunia. A couple of ‘em are older and no longer quite so evil.
Sometimes, the older ones intervene when the younger ones go all Tasmanian
Devil on my belongings. Being teenagers, however, sometimes they just ignore the
carnage and continue staring at their phones.
The nine “under-fives” always manage to create
a path of destruction that would, under other conditions, qualify me for some
sort of federal disaster relief. Currently, the greatest offenders are my
daughter Aubreii’s two youngest, Ari and Juniper. Such pretty names for such
maniacal personalities.
Luckily (for them) they’re both
baby-model cute, which is how they’ve managed to live so long. They have those
big, innocent blue eyes their mother once deployed to incapacitate me whenever
she sensed the onset of righteous paternal retribution.
And so, every year I wind up with
missing and/or broken stuff. Oh, sure, I try to pack as much of it as possible away
in drawers before they arrive. But there’s always something I miss. That’s what
gets broken.
This year, however, things are going to
be different.
As I write this, Thanksgiving is just a
few days off. After discussing the problem with The Lovely Mrs. Taylor and
brainstorming over a bottle of Merlot, I’ve come up with a few ideas I think
might help.
The first was Mrs. Taylor’s idea: steel
gates, like those used by mall shops at closing time. You know, you push a
button and a big, steel gate rolls down like armor plating over the entire
front of the store. Voila! Access is denied!
My grand-kids being who they are, it’s
possible I’ll need to electrify the steel gates somehow as a secondary
deterrent. I figure I could tie the system in to the front door bell. When the
bell rings, gates all over the house would slam shut and my precious stuff would
be safe.
Another option (this one was mine) is a
network of crisscrossing lasers. I could install them in the floors and
ceilings around my DVD rack, porcelain duck collection and antique typewriter. The
lasers would use facial recognition software to fire whenever anyone who has
never shaved gets within touching distance. I’d program the lasers with just
enough “oomph” to sting, but not actually cut any children into slices. I don’t
need to deal with angry parents during the holidays!
A low-tech possibility might be a few
vicious attack dogs tied up at strategic points around the house. Again, I
wouldn’t want the dogs to be too vicious.
Despite their evil-ness, I do in fact love my grandchildren, even the most
nefarious of the lot (I’m looking at you,
June-Bug).
Then there’s the idea of building moats
around all the cabinets that are home to my stuff. I really like this one, but
Mrs. T isn’t keen on the idea of live sharks in the house. (Did I mention
the sharks?) Anyway, the moat’s probably not going to happen.
From a purely aesthetic point of view, a
series of those “invisible fences” might work; the kind they use to keep dogs
in a yard without actually building a real
fence? The only downside I can see is that I’d have to get all nine grandkids fitted
with electric collars, which could get expensive. Also, there’s probably an
ethical issue here somewhere; people are wimps these days and some goody
two-shoes would surely complain if I started shocking toddlers.
At any rate, if any of these ideas work
out for me, I’ll be sure to share the news with you other grandparents straight
away. I know I can’t be the only geezer dealing with this issue.
(616) 745-9530
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