Remotely entertaining - a true story

We had a real problem in the house recently. We couldn't find the remote. Now, sure, this was a great opportunity for an object lesson about convenience and luxury and being spoiled. I tried to point out to the kids that in the olden days, whenever we wanted to change channels we had to have a sibling get up and do it for us. This was true suffering. For the most part, the children did not want to hear this lesson. Maddie dealt with the crisis by retreating to her room -- not to engage in some hermitage and mourning over the loss, but to watch TV on her computer. Talia simply downloaded an app to her phone which simulated a remote so she didn't have to share in our technological backwater. No lesson learned.

We looked everywhere. And then looked again. We retraced our steps, then we stepped more and bought more tracing paper and traced again. We looked in the cushions. We bought new cushions and looked in them. Nothing. Then today, it hit me -- look in the garbage. It wasn't there and that was gross. But I did look in the recyclables pile and found the remote there. So yay.

Now, that might be the end of the story but I won't let this go. I made a big deal out of doing this -- in front of my children I started rooting through the fireplace. I explained that people always say "I found it -- it was in the last place that I looked!" Well, we all know how dumb that sounds because, once you find the thing, you stop looking so any place you found the object was, by definition the last place you looked. So I made sure to look in one more place after finding the remote so that the next time someone says in the presence of my children "It's always in the last place you look" my kids can say, "no it isn't -- once my dad found it in the second to last place he looked." I told them to file this piece of information away, and then I said "I wish I spent more time at the office" so that if someone says "no one ever said 'I wish I spent more time at the office' " my kids can say "my dad did say that."

On an unrelated note...we wonder why our kids don't have any friends.