There are risks to having children. Corwin demonstrated this to me on Friday. While he was messing about in my cube at work he pulled out my inflatable alien figure. While doing this he knocked over and smashed a jar I had been keeping as a momento of Mom (it was from her earlier, wild days in college). I wasn’t quite sure what to say to Corwin, who at first claimed that the jar wasn’t too damaged and then that he’d just been trying to get the alien and therefore secondary effects didn’t count. I wasn’t very impressed by these arguments, however. But I didn’t want to yell at him too much because it wasn’t deliberate, but it was an artifact of his general obliviousness, something I’ve been trying to work on him about. I settled for letting him know that I was sad but no overt punisment.
I told Mom about this later and her reply was “you still had that?”
P.S. As I’m typing this, Charles is trying to get me to ride on a stick horse that he has, swinging it around and only by shear luck not smashing my screen. Sigh. Time to go ride.