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...

Camping out Neah Cape Cawd

Miles Standish State Park, South Carver, Massachusetts. A peaceful enough place, with a few ponds and some pine-shaded campsites, vernal forest edging cranberry bogs and picturesque homes.
We pull into our little spot and level out the camper, weary after a full weekend of hawking our goods at King Richard's Faire. Having already visited the over-priced grocery store in Carver (pronounced Cawh-veh by the natives), we were eager to throw our meager meal in the wok and settle down with good books- Anna Karenina and Atlas Shrugged, respectively.
Cooking inside a truck topper camper gets a bit steamy, and not in the good sort of way. Michael cranked open the windows while I put the finishing touches on whatever slop sizzled on the two-burner stove. We ladled food into hand-thrown bowls, crawled into our cozy nooks, and had just cracked open our classics when The Voice assailed our ears.
It was a nasal voice, female and loud, with a heavy Eastern Seaboard accent, obviously shouting into a cell phone,
"Yeah, hi!" The Voice carried over several empty campsites and rattled our windowframes, "I'm out camping- yeah CAMPING. Oh, yeah... in Cawhveh. Camping. Ohmigod it's so peaceful heauh. Yeah, I'm cooking trawhout- grilling! GRILLING TRAWHOUT. I caught it myself, in the pawhnd. Yeah. Peaceful."
I cannot begin to explain to you, without personally mimicking her voice over the phone (which I will gladly do) just how loud this woman was. If you have been in that area of Massachusetts, you will probably be familiar with how this certain type of woman sounds, rather like the sound aluminum foil would make if run over a cheese grater, but amplified to about 140 Db.
The woman then proceeded to call every person on her Nextel call list, repeating the exact one-sided conversation, verbatim, approximately eleventy-nine times.
While I tried not to hate Kitty Shcherbatskaya for being such a muddle-headed fool, I tried even harder to block the woman's voice from my head. It was too warm to shut the windows in the camper, but after an hour our nerves could bear no more. We peeled off as many layers as we could, shut the windows, and ran the bathroom vent fan for white noise. Still, The Voice splintered through the trees,
"Yeah, CAMPING... cooking trawhout... so peaceful out heauh."

I love Massachusetts, but next time I go, I'm bringing my iPod.