Monday, June 22, 2009

Riding In Cars With Kids


Waiting for long periods of time in the car with all of the kids is like a visit to the 7th circle of hell. After a minute and a half the whining begins. Such was the afternoon that we had to sit in the car for two hours waiting on a cop.

My husband’s car had been stolen from in front of our house. Three days later our next door neighbor knocked and said that she thought she saw it parked five blocks away. We followed her over and, sure enough, there it was.

The police were called and we were told to not touch the car, look at the car, breathe on the car, blink too close to the car. Just sit and wait for a police officer. One would be with us as soon as possible. Evidently “as soon as possible” in cop speak means “whenever-we-feel-like-dragging-ourselves-over-there-to-deal-with-your-unexciting-lots-of-paperwork-but-no-glory-shit-fest”.

In one of my shining moments of motherhood I thought I’d try something productive with the kids while we waited. I only had a notebook and a pen so I decided we'd do a group story. You know, one person starts a story, the next person adds to it, and on and on. I thought that we might get a funny, interesting story to laugh over. When you have a 13, 7, 4 and 3 year olds, all adding to one story, funny and interesting is an understatement.

I started…

(Mom) Once upon a time in a land named…

(Noah) Giantland the giants were having a rampage.

(Ruby) They saw a dead dinosaur, picked up its bones and beat each other with them.

(Violet) The giants huge feet walked around and squished all the sheep.

(Hank) The dinosaur went into the Batman car, drove it and ate a cat.

(Noah) The giants stepped on the Batman car. When the giants squished the Batman car it opened a portal to the human world. The giants walked through and crushed and ate all the humans.

(Ruby) They walked back to their world, laid down in the grass and took a nap. When the sun came out they turned to stone. A cow had a big huge hammer and crushed all the big stone giants to pieces.

(Violet) The cow found a wagon with a lion inside.

(Hank) The lion ate the cow. Then the dinosaur ate the lion and walked back to drive his Batman car.


I started the story so I figured I’d better end it…quick. In a brilliant move stolen from the old Newhart show I used the classic…


(Mom) THEN I WOKE UP! That was the weirdest dream I ever had. The End!

“YEAH!!!” everybody yelled. I looked at the clock. Four minutes had passed. “Yeah!” Somebody kill me.

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