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Something Light: Destructo tots
Time again to steal from my favorite drive-time radio program, the Jeff & Jer Show-gram here in San Diego. The other day while driving in to my office (Starbucks), Jeff & Jer had people call in with the answer to this question: “What is the most valuable thing one of your kids ever destroyed?”
One lady called in to tell how, on a grocery store trip, her 4-year-old daughter slammed one of those tiny “Customer in Training” shopping carts into an end-cap, sending an entire pyramid of glass-jarred Tree Top Applesauce crashing to the floor. (No one was hurt.)
Not every caller’s story was “Something Light.” Another lady phoned in the story of her teenage son, who had defaced public property with graffiti, leaving Mom and Dad with a $43,000 bill payable to the city. (Youch!)
I’m going to expand Jeff & Jer’s original question a bit to include you and your relatives (what did you or your little brothers, sisters, cousins, etc., destroy?) Also, the destruction doesn’t have to be costly — just spectacular or difficult to clean up, such as the time one of our boys, at age two, scooped the contents of an entire jar of Vaseline onto his head and worked it into his hair. (He thought this was hysterical; it took us three days to get it out.)
back to top30 Comments to “Something Light: Destructo tots”
When I was a preschooler, my younger brother and I broke every egg in the refrigerator onto the kitchen floor one at a time, looking for a little yellow chick.
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Janie — that’s cute!
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In the summer of 1993, my then ten-year old son was taking sailing lessons at Pearl Harbor’s Rainbow Marina. (A great deal, two boys at $150 each sailed four hours every afternoon, five days a week for a month!)
They were in small sailboats manageable by one or two kids. His boat got out of control and went a little too far to the south, where it ran into the USS Bowfin, a World War II submarine.
Japanese tourists amassed topside to take pictures, shore patrol was called in and the manager of the marina had to reclaim the ship and the boy. Fortunately, no one thought it necessary to call in his father for reprimand.
There were no injuries.
And the Bowfin was one of the first stops our daughter-in-law wanted to see in Hawaii. “I’ve been hearing for years about the time he attacked a submarine . . . ”
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My brother and I threw a baseball in the house and hit our twenty-gallon aquarium. Water and fish went all over the carpeted floor. Our parents were too much in shock to punish us–at that moment.
I really can’t think of another instance.
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My son was running through the house, trip over the cord and drug my laptop computer into the floor and ripped the AC port out. It lingered a few weeks but was never the same. We had to put it down.
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Oh and I burned down the kitchen when I was a teen.
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This had to have happened in the mid 1930’s. My sister and I would let our parents sleep in on Saturdays and go out to play by ourselves. One day, we put sand in the gas tank of dad’s car. He had to remove the tank from the car and clean it.
Neither of us remember that incident, but he never did let us forget it.
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My husband likes to tell the story of how he started whacking the windshield of his dad car with a toy bow. The first crack made such an interesting pattern he just kept whacking. His dad just didn’t see this as the exercise in creative expression that most parent now days would see.
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Lynn – I hope you got a picture of your son with the Vaseline in his hair!
Our niece, at age 2 1/2, got hold of a tube of Desitin and used it to paint her face, arms and hands one day during naptime. She usually went to sleep within 15 minutes after I had her lay down but this day I heard her 30 minutes after so went to check on her and then had to turn around and get the camera before I cleaned her up.
Thankfully, not much of that was in her hair!
RE – Janie’s story – We gave our 2 year old grandson 1/2 doz eggs to break on the sidewalk one summer day – I’m not sure what that was all about but he enjoyed it as well as using the hose to clean it all up afterwards.
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Lynn – I hope you got a picture of your son with the Vaseline in his hair!
I did!
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Lynn (#2)
I don’t recall that my mom thought it was that cute, but I don’t recall being punished, just being told never to do it again, because eggs in the refrigerator would never have chicks in them.
Later on, probably sometime in late elementary school, my brother and I brought some eggs in from the large, uncleared, vacant area near our house that had a stream going through it. (They may have been duck eggs.) We decided to open these eggs (they’d never been refrigerated, so we saw them as potentially containing baby birds of some sort). One night while our mother was having bridge club downstairs, and our father was probably in his basement office, my brother and I decided that would be a good time to investigate our eggs further. This time, we carefully opened one over the toilet on the 2nd floor so we wouldn’t make a mess. The egg was rotten, and the resulting stench drove the card-playing ladies out the front door into the chilly fall evening.
Even after this disastrous experimentation, I remember that my brother and I were given a chemistry set one Christmas. My parents, I realize, were very brave and valued hands-on learning.
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My dad says one summer afternoon my older bro and I were conspicuously missing from the back yard and there was a hose leading into the garage.
He came to check on us and found us inside his car merrily ‘cleaning’ it with a sprinkler.
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When I was in 1st grade I played with matches out behind our next door neighbors lumber pile. Not too long after the fire got away from us the lumber pile caught on fire, and began raging furiously. When I say “us” I mean the kid across the street under whose influence I smoked my first cigarette. (I nearly coughed up a lung and never touched another cigarette.) And not too long after that, amid loud howling sirens and flashing red lights, the fire trucks and firemen came and put out the fire. Luckily no buildings were included in the blaze (our garage was right next to the lumber pile). Unfortunately the firemen weren’t called upon to put out the fire that was applied to my “seat of learning” and soon I was howling and seeing flashing lights. And then my sister had to rub it in; “And to think that last week you said you wanted to be a fireman!”
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In the early years of our marriage, Elvera and I lived in a 38′ house trailer. One morning we were in bed and we smelled something strange. Our toddler had put his plastic toys in a pan and was cooking them. Fortunately the smell proceeded the fire (there was none).
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One summer day, I got up early and decided to surprise my dad with a garden plot by the time he got home from work. I got out the shovel and started shoveling, coming across what I thought was a stubborn tree root. I just kept jumping and jumping on the shovel to break it, and it finally did. Dad was very pleased with the garden plot, but very surprised when later that night he tried to turn the TV on and something wasn’t right. Apparently, someone had cut the cable cord….
I was also told that my older brother, when he was two, did some creative finger-painting on his walls with the contents of his diaper…
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My little sister fingerpainted Vaseline on our sofa when she was maybe 2. It didn’t really destroy it, since somehow mom managed to get it out. I actually used that sofa in my first apartment MANY years later. It has finally been put down.
My sister-in-law burned the family house down when she was 5. She was playing with a charcoal lighter and her dad caught her. He put it in a cupboard above the fridge. This little miss wasn’t done playing, so she climbed up and got it, unbeknownst to her father. She then hid in her sister’s closet. Thankfully, everyone got out of the house, but the house was a total loss. This little girl is now in her first year of college. However, she may never live that one down – if my husband and his siblings have anything to say about it!
So far, my children haven’t wrecked anything valuable. My son poked a hole in our new air mattress over the weekend, so his great uncle had to sleep on our lumpy futon for the second night of his visit. I hope to have no stories to add to this discussion in the future!
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No major damage..though there was the time second son (4?) decided to help daddy wash the car. The best position of course was standing on the hood. While wearing soccer cleats. Using the cloth dipped in the old oil that had been just changed out.
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Just since my last post I decided to try and finish up some painting my husband started this weekend. While I was cleaning the brushes my son decided to “help”. No serious damage, but he’s in the tub now.
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In high school my friend and I got on the bad side of another friend’s dad when we decided to decorate her car with spray snow late one night. It rarely froze where we lived, but that night the temps dropped and the spray snow stayed glued to the car’s paint for months. Though we tried to make amends, he did not speak to us for a long time.
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Then there was the day I wanted to take the AC out of the upstairs window: opening up the window, the AC teetered then launched itself out the window, the until-then plugged-in cord trailing behind.
A moment later, I was absent an AC had a broken basement window, and had just witnessed a glorious plunge to the sidewalk. I was still laughing at the destruction as I took the window to the hardware store to be repaired.
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When I was a mechanic, I once let a boss borrow a drill bit. When it was returned a good 1/2 inch of it was ruined. Rather than grind it all the way down to the good profile which would have taken a good bit of time, I ground a deep groove around the spot where I wanted it to break off. Then I proceeded to fasten it in the vice, and pop the end off with a hammer. The end went flying and promptly broke out the driver’s side window of the car I was working on… There went a good chunk of that days paycheck…
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The only thing I remember being somewhat responsible for breaking was the plastic side of a fluorescent light fixture in my third grade classroom. I had a superball that I enjoyed playing with at home, and I had brought it to school because it was a rainy day and I thought it would be more fun to play with for indoors recess than whatever stuff was in the classroom. I was careful with it myself, but one of my classmates was less careful, and it hit and broke a piece off the light fixture. I suppose it was pretty small potatoes compared to some of the stories here, but I had never damaged public property in my life and I was horrified. The teacher blamed me, because it was my ball, and I was sure she was going to call my parents and tell what a terrible thing I had done. I remember I dreaded walking home that day.
Apparently she never called them, or told them a thing about it, because they never mentioned it. The light fixture got fixed, and probably everyone in the world has forgotten about it except me. I never took another toy to school, and I never liked superballs quite as well afterward.
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Yes, I know, it’s supposed to be about kids but when you don’t have any–well you know. Sorry, I can’t resist telling this one about my dog. She was a Border Collie. Lots of energy. She ran through the dining room and caught both the power cord and the foot pedal cord to my sewing machine. The machine didn’t fall on the floor. It flew about three feet. Although it was smashed to pieces, we took it to the sewing machine store (now the good part!) My husband saw the computerized sewing/embroidery machines and bought me one! So thanks to the dog, I went from a low end to a high end machine.
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I grew up in Phoenix. Annual rainfall six inches. My sister got a book from the school library called One Day It Rained Cats and Dogs. I don’t remember the reason we wanted to look at it outside, but we did. Then she left it outside, and that night it rained cats and dogs. My sister quietly returned the library book in the book return slot, hoping no one would notice, but somehow the librarian did notice. Mom paid for half of the book, my sister the other half.
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I remember my freshman year in high school I had a welding class. I was practicing arc welding and accidentally welded the piece of metal to the grating. The teacher was mad. He said I would have gotten an A since it was such a good weld, but he had to cut the grating apart to get the metal off!
My dad tells of a time when a neighbor boy of his in the Bronx NYC dropped a lit match down a car gas tank to see what would happen. Another time, one of them put a potato in the exhaust pipe of a car just to watch it launch when the engine started.
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Not really my doing, but I was “involved”.
Last year I took my father-in-law’s 1972 Ford LTD in to get the wiring for the trailer hitch replaced. It is a very BIG, old, heavy duty car.
The mechanic started to move the car to the shop and promptly backed it into the side of the newish SUV that had just parked behind it, right in front of all us waiting customers. Upon hearing the reaction of the young woman next to me, I said, “I think my car just ran into your car without us. What do we do now?”
Since it was the mechanic’s fault the company/mechanic dealt with the fairly significant damage, like dents a couple inches deep, to the SUV. We couldn’t find a new dent in the LTD, so they just waved all the labor fees on the wiring job for me instead of having to report two damaged cars to their insurance company.
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The house behind my M-I-L had one of those “teenagers threw a raucus party in a house while the owners were vacationing” events – a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of damages (all of the wall and fixtures, the cars in the garage, virtually all of the personal property).
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KRM,
Now see? That is one of the blessings of my lifestlye. Even if total destruction should happen I can not even imagine it would be one hundred thousand dollars, okay not even ninety thousand, okay eighty… you people speak in numbers bigger than I can fathom.
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Mumsee,
Depending where one lives, it doesn’t take an extravagant lifestyle for one’s property to be worth over one hundred thousand dollars. We might have been able to get a house for a bit less if we took one without a basement, but having grown up in “tornado alley” in Nebraska, a basement has always been a priority for my husband. (And a tornado did come through town last summer, though it missed our neighborhood.)
We discovered, when getting homeowners insurance in Michigan (where our previous house was), that replacement cost is considerably higher than appraised cost. I don’t really understand why (they talked about the difficulties of replacing the foundation if it were damaged), but all the insurance companies seem to price it that way. I guess it’s sort of like getting body work on a car – to fix a severely damaged body costs more than a new car, because it’s easier to start from scratch than repair that much damage.
So if our property were a total loss (including vehicles and possessions), I would guess that it could run a couple hundred thousand.
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Pauline,
I know, I am just continually amazed at the cost of things. We were very fortunate with our purchase but sadly the foreowners weren’t as it was a foreclosure. We do believe God had a plan when He put us here and believe it is being played out with kids we could not otherwise imagine being able to take in. Then when people talk about the loss of some walls and fixtures and cars and personal property at two hundred thousand just after Michelle was lamenting having to sell at a loss of so much more than my whole house. I guess I am just amazed that anybody can afford to live anywhere! We are pricing ourselves out of life. But God still reigns.
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