Shubinesque

Several weeks back my older three children finally got collectively clever enough to pull a prank on my Hubby. Trinity called him into the dining room to “show him something” and when he got beneath the stair railing, the other kids upstairs dumped all the laundry directly out of their hamper and onto his unsuspecting head in one big heap. They were pretty proud of themselves that they actually managed to surprise their Dad and pull this off (we were rather impressed too).

Fast forward two months to tonight. Our typical Sunday evening routine lately has been to have Sunday Night Special for dinner. This consists of a fruit plate, different deli meats, cheese slices, and a variety of crackers. Everyone gets to pick what they want, I don’t have to hear “I don’t like this,” it requires no thought and very little effort for me, and is non-messy enough to eat in the living room while we engage in our other Sunday evening ritual of watching AFV (America’s Funniest Home Videos). Yes, amazingly enough that’s still on the air.

Every week the show has an assignment section where they tell you what kind of videos they want you to send in, and the kids keep laughing and saying they have to try that. Uh huh. So tonight, Trinity called George into the dining room to “show him something.” As he was standing there trying to figure out what he was supposed to be looking at and noticing that she kept trying to reposition him to right beneath the stairs, it became apparent that the children were clumsily trying to recreate their original prank.

Unfortunately, this proved more difficult than the first time around. Georgie was in the living room hiding under a blanket with the camera, thinking that no one actually noticed the giggling fuzzy blob on the floor. The fact that he kept going, “Wait! I can’t get it to turn on” did not improve the stealth factor.

While Trinity was downstairs trying to tell Daddy where to stand and Georgie was in the other room fighting with the camera, Anika was upstairs wrestling with the hamper. Since Georgie was downstairs not filming instead of providing the helpful muscle as he had the first go around, the hamper was too big for Anika and she had to content herself with throwing pieces of clothing over the rail one by one and hoping they actually landed on her Dad. Unfortunately, they landed next to him and the intermittent drifting down of a shirt here and a sock there was not quite such a startling blitzkrieg as having an entire hamper dumped on you at once.

Since all three of them gave themselves away by laughing, the camera caught absolutely none of this, and George could tell from within five seconds exactly what was going on, the entire fiasco was a clear failure. However, it was funny enough that I did wish we had it on tape (AFV would be proud). Instead, I have to content myself with writing it up here. Yes, I live with a barrel of monkeys.

Rachel