I Smell Something

Independence is a major milestone in the life of a child. Being able to dress ones self and be responsible for various small tasks builds a child’s self-esteem and pushes them towards dependability. But there are flaws in the process as they grow into their role in their growing responsibility.

Being in a household that has both parents working, my son (7) and middle daughter (12) have one day a week where they have to be home by them selves for about 20 minutes or so. This isn’t a big deal, they know the rules and follow them pretty well. So yesterday, they get home and Speedy E. goes up to her room as normal and Baseball E. goes to get a snack. He has a slice of pizza left over and decides to warm it up in the microwave, something he has never really done on his own. He goes upstairs and asks his sister how long to let it cook and she said 30 seconds. He heads back downstairs and fires up the machine. Apparently, 30 minutes is not the same as 30 seconds because he turned it off when he saw some smoke starting to come out of the microwave. We think it ran about 5 minutes before it started smoking but we are not sure.

House smells like smoke a bit but we opened some windows and it seemed to so the trick. We talked Speedy about not being a couch potato and to actually act like a baby sitter. No blood, no foul.

So I was home for about 15 minutes before I had to head back out the door. I saw there was a letter from my high school so I opened it up to check out the news.

Back in the day when my gut wasn’t the size of a basketball, I use to play basketball. I was ok but nothing great…I just had some mad jumping skills. Yes, white men can jump. Anyway, during my junior year we went to the state finals and eventually, our team became kind of an icon in our town. Well that was 25 years ago and the school is going to honor the team in a ceremony before the varsity game on January 30th, 2009. I guess I will get to see how bad my body has broken down in comparison to the rest of the guys I played with back then. They are also having an alumni tourney the following day. There is now way I will play that because I will probably have a heart attack the second time running down the court. I wonder if I can still dunk?