"Theories on Kids" Giveaway

Who are all these kids and why are they calling me mom?

I used to be this woman: young, formerly cute, with a bad attitude and a mean face. I started out with great theories on raising kids. Then one day I found a 25-pound bag of sugar spread evenly on the storage room floor. The kids and their friends were ice-skating in their socks over the slippery crystals.

Chalking it up to bad outside influences, I kept them isolated from naughty neighbor children. The next thing they designed was a swimming pool. They covered the shower drain with a towel and let the water overflow onto the bathroom floor. The plan was to fill up the bathroom and swim like fish in an aquarium. The resulting flood ruined the floor, and the carpet in the next room.

Experts on child-rearing never have children. If they did, they'd know nothing works. My theories toppled like blocks in a playroom.

When the corner of the boys bedroom started attracting flies, I investigated. Hmmm...what was the stinky, sticky liquid that had stiffened the carpet and eaten away the carpet pad...oh, even the floor boards were dissolving...Could it be that animals lived in this room and had marked their spot with urine? These could NOT be my children! My children were obediently doing their extra reading at bedtime, not filling their toy box with bodily fluids!

Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your kids.

There were emotional issues, too. One kid had a conniption fit when the tub drain was released, convinced that he and all of his loved ones would be sucked down pipes and live in the sewer muck forever. He could hear the plug being released from any room in the house and broke into screams of terror. Another kid refused to take baths. He sat, fully clothed, and stirred the bathwater so it would sound like he was washing. Fears of wind, car washes, and vacuums ran rampant. Two kids "rolled" their heads in a rhythmic effort to sooth themselves to sleep...for hours every night! I sat in darkened bedrooms to scare away bad dreams, and laid in darkened doorways to rescue sleepwalkers.

My bad dreams involved taking them out in public. Mom rearranged the furniture one year for Thanksgiving. She hauled the ping-pong table upstairs to the dining room, and set it with her lovely silver and china. The meal got underway, with instructions on where to sit, when the fresh rolls would appear, and thanks to great-grandma for her homemade watermelon pickles. "Everybody sit up! It's time for the prayer."

I scanned the room for my cute little boys while my sister searched for hers. Suddenly the metal, decorative room divider lurched towards the table. As we all looked up in horror we saw four little monkeys clutching the aluminum scroll-work as it fell from it's place between the ceiling and the half-wall. In the nick of time, our husbands caught it before our sons became the centerpiece.

I'm not telling these stories to brag. I'm explaining why I have a collection of dozens of books on raising kids. If you can top these stories with one of your own, you will become eligible for a book on how to keep your sanity while living in an insane asylum. If you have such a story, but are not currently in mommy circumstances, please contribute your comment, and if you win you'll get a different kind of book.

I childproofed the house but they keep getting back in.

This new giveaway requires a comment on this post by Monday at midnight.

(All illustrations here are from the darling book Jillian Jiggs, by Phoebe Gilman.)