Sunday, September 9, 2012

"And don't act like a bunch of wild Indians!

I've talked before about moms using extreme commands in their parenting and that the point may not be getting across to their kids, for example my posts about the toilet overflowing. Well, I have another example from when I was about 7 years old.

We went to my aunt's house which was about a 2 hour drive. When we were ready to get out of the car my mom turned to us and said,

"Do not act like a bunch of wild Indians while we're here!"

I'm thinking, no problem, we don't usually play that anyway.

We had a great time that day. We played in the basement for a couple of hours. We decided to make a grocery store. Lucky for us, they had a deep freezer. We took out all of the meat and set it on a bench in the basement for our store. Evidently, we were being too loud so they told us to go outside. Great! We played hide and seek, running through their lot and into the house and back outside etc. Well, the moms didn't like that so we were shunned to the outside and they locked the door behind us!

No problem! I had plenty of ideas (being the oldest of the kids there). We made a garage sale. I thought we could make plenty of money with all the stuff in my aunt's garage that they obviously didn't need. So anything not bolted down was drug to the driveway and tagged for sale. I remember asking my younger cousin, Tommy, to go and count our items. I heard him saying…

"1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 14, 15,…"

I was working with amateurs! It didn't matter, the moms found out and we had to bring everything back into the garage! Foiled again!

Well, they let us back into the house and we were told to play in the basement. We ended the day building forts in their storage area with boxes, lawn chairs and whatever else would stack nicely. It was time to head home. As we got into the car, I thought, Oh brother, see, we didn't even play Indians like mom was so afraid of!

Two weeks later, my aunt and uncle had a terrible smell coming from their basement. The meat had been left out from our grocery store and had rotted. Well, if they had let us have customers, we could have moved our product a little better!