Just a quick update this week, but I do feel compelled to mention one incident which has so far set the high water mark on my children’s miscreant behavior.
The other night I was watching the kids when I turned my back just long enough to watch a short segment of a TV talk show. The girls disappeared into the laundry room, which in addition to the washer and dryer is inhabited by our cat and his litter box. I swear, not more than a few minutes had passed when I realized that they were being too quiet, which is NEVER a good sign. Hearing laughing and cries of “Bad cat!” I tracked them down to their hiding place, opened the door, and promptly flipped my lid.
Most surfaces up to four feet high in the whole room were smeared with clotted kitty litter, and the girls were busy rubbing the gunk into the hapless cat’s fur. Sam had apparently filled a bowl with water to aid in this fiendish alchemy, and the stuff was EVERYWHERE. Upon seeing me, Sam immediately shouted “Mandy did it!” even though I COULD TOTALLY SEE HER WITH TWO HAND FULLS OF GUMMY KITTY LITTER.
Like I said, I flipped out and started screaming at them. Realizing that this kind of reaction was on a WHOLE other level than my typical admonishments, they both bolted and headed for higher ground (i.e., upstairs) while I continued to scream at them and the newly crusty cat looked up at me with a kind of “Where the hell WERE YOU?” expression. Hearing the promotion, Geralyn ran up from the basemen to ask what was going on, saw the laundry room, and then she flipped HER lid.
In the end, the girls had to clean up everything (under protest, natch) while I hosed down the cat in their bathtub. The cat, I believe, was mostly praying for death. Not necessarily his own.
That’s…wow. I can barely even find it funny because I’m imagining how I would have reacted. Okay, it’s a little tiny bit funny.
Seriously, what is UP with kids giving that “I didn’t do it, someone else did it!” denial even when their hands are still full of gummy kitty litter, metaphorically speaking? My daughter is a couple of months younger than Sam, and she does that to me all the time. She doesn’t even have a younger sister to blame, and she still tries to get away with it.
I hope the cat wasn’t too traumatized. 🙂
Murphy is seriously rethinking her holiday plans. 🙂
Oh noes. Just… oh noes. Just remember, you have many years to get revenge. Say, from the years of 10 – 15 would be prime time for this story to accidentally work its way into conversation when their friends and suspicious coed others are hanging around. With emphasis, of course, on the glee with which they were enjoying the goopy kitty liter…
Or maybe I’m just mean.
You must have the most patient cat in the world; if I’d tried that nonsense with my cats when I was a kid, they would have scratched most of the skin from my face.