Payback

I have a theory.
I know that not every woman is going to be rational when picking a tiny LEGO brick out of her foot, but bear with me here...

LEGO: Causing foot pain to millions of parents worldwide.

Our kids are just payback. Remember the times you dragged out all of your mom's steel pots and banged away for hours? Now your own kids have a heavy wooden spoon and have figured out that the stair railing has unique harmonics. It's payback time.

When I was a kid, we didn't have a lot of toys, but we made good use of what we had. There was this toy in our house- I've never seen anything quite like it- that made a glorious noise. It was about ten inches long, had three wheels set into the peach plastic body, and an ugly animal sticker below the handle. The wheels- hideous primary colored melamine- would make a tinkly sound when spun gently. Spin faster, and the pitch rose. Spin all three at once, and you have your own little orchestra going on!
We would spin that thing for hours, and I distinctly remember my mom's voice, cracking from the pressure, yelling upstairs: "Enough!!"
Sorry, mom.

But now, you see, I have this wonderful mother-in-law. And she loves to gives my kids presents. For Christmas a few years back, she found these little kid keyboards. You know the kind- electric, with various beats and loops and 'demos'. When you turn this particular kind of keyboard on, it defaults to LOUD, running the scales a few times, before making a weird 'duhn.' sound.

She bought three.Children's Electric Keyboards: "No, sorry honey, we're out of batteries..."

Yup, one for each kid.

Payback.

Tinkertoys: Besides the undeniable quality of getting lost in the house,
they can also make good weapons.
I have fond memories of being smacked
in the head with a setup much like this.

For every Tinkertoy my mom stepped on, I have a LEGO wedged between my toes.

For every piece of crud I dropped downstairs through the post-and-beam assembly of our house, I find a piece of string tied to a doorknob.

For every marble out of our Chinese Checkers game that went rolling down the hall, I have... a marble out of our own Chinese Checkers game that winds up in my garbage disposal.

Marbles: Not sounding so good in the garbage disposal.

Looking through my children's toys yesterday, I realized just how many noise toys that we've received from parents. People who have lived this life of shattered concentration, staccato noise, and random toybox outbursts in the middle of the night!

I used to think it was treachery, now I see it for what it is.
They, too have put up with us, they are no stranger to finding the screwdriver and removing all of the batteries from a hiccuping speaker system. They, too, have limped and hobbled on bruised feet after stepping on tiny sharp-edged blocks and game components.

It's just payback time.

Wait until my kids grow up, I bet they have some nice noisemakers by then...