We moved into our house when I was 9 months pregnant with Liddy. She was due any tick of the clock & we had just one floor down. The toilet & shower were working but could only be reached by a precarious journey along the beams & joists. No wonder our middle children were so good at sport. They used to run. Me, I'd be lucky not to topple into the hole!
Anyway, we were all camped down on the living room floor, all our worldly possessions stacked in boxes around us experiencing family togetherness. We also found we had an extended 'family' of very unwanted visitors ~ a mouse plague of enormus proportions. Yuk! Dearest bought huge numbers of traps & every night went about setting them & every night we would hear the regular snap, snap as the traps went off. In the morning Dearest went round tossing the limp bodies down our hill for the monitor lizards to consume.
We were always telling the boys not to touch the traps. Jossie, at going on 6, was quite sensible but the twins weren't quite 3 & chronic fiddlers. They couldn't leave anything alone & Theo was forever egging Dino on 'cause if Dino didn't get hurt it was safe for him to have a go. The inevitable eventually happened. We were woken by a sharp snap & a piercing shriek followed by loud wails; 'Ry' dead! Ry' dead!' Poor kid. The look on his face said it all. He thought he was about to follow the mice down the hill, hors d'ouvers for the monitor lizard!
I would like to say this experience vastly improved the listening capacity of my sons & their obedience levels but sadly this was not so. Some children only learn by experience. I own a large number of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment