Learning to avert natural disasters under three feet tall

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.

MTaylor325@gmail.com

(616) 745-9530

I refuse to celebrate Thanksgiving day ‘lite’

OK, I’m going to have to rant for a minute here. I hate ranting this close to the holidays but feel I really have no choice in the matter.

Day after tomorrow (as I write this) is Thanksgiving; I’ll be celebrating the holiday with the kids, grandkids and sundry.

In preparation for the event, last night Lori ushered me out of the house with a “last minute things we previously forgot” shopping list; white potatoes, stuffing, flour … your basic American holiday starch fest. Unhealthy, caloric and (with Lori wearing the kitchen apron this year) sublimely delicious.

But Thanksgiving comes but once a year, so caution to the wind, right?

Wrong.

It turns out the uninvited nannies who ceaselessly monitor our collective well-being are trying to insinuate themselves between me and that extra dollop of Cool Whip on my pumpkin pie. 

While shopping at the grocery, I encountered the word “lite” a grand total of 1,237 times. It was on everything! Lite stuffing! Lite (and sodium reduced) soup stock! Even Lite Cool Whip!  Cool Whip, man!

Technically, I’m not sure Cool Whip even qualifies as food. I always thought it was created from long chain polymers at a factory in New Jersey or maybe as the by-product of the Spandex manufacturing process. I’ve never cared, because it tastes good.

I never asked it to be lite. If I want lite, I’ll eat celery. When it comes to Thanksgiving, I want yummy, not lite.

But I had to dig through an entire pile of lite Cool Whip to get to the real stuff. Why? Why why why why why?

Can’t I just, for one lousy day a year, enjoy gastronomical excess without being reminded I’m stuffing my body with the dietary equivalent of cyanide? All year long I eat healthy. I have salads for lunch and add “superfoods” like cranberries, walnuts, avocados and salmon to most every meal. I try to avoid the deep fryer. I drink lots of water. 

I eat oatmeal, for cryin’ out loud! Oatmeal! That’s, like, cattle feed! But apparently, it’ll keep me alive long enough to be a burden to my children. So I eat it.

On Thanksgiving, however, I want to forget all that. I want sugar, fat, grease, sauces, starches, and I want them all in quantities that would embarrass attendees of the John Candy/Mama Cass joint family reunion.

I want a food orgy that would make Caligula blush.

Once it’s all over, once the final piece of apple pie has been eaten, once that last turkey drumstick has been stripped to the marrow and simmered into soup, then … and only then … will I start worrying about my diet again.

But until that day (probably Monday, based on past performance) I don’t want to see the word “lite” again.

Catch Mike Taylor’s Reality Check radio program every weekday at 5:30 p.m. on WGLM, m106.3 on your FM dial.

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 548-8273