Domestic Oblivion

Over the past few months, things have been happening around Chez Star.  Each one of those things probably wouldn’t be the cause of a situational meltdown, in and of themselves, but when you add them all together……it just sort of makes me want to get into my car and drive far, far, far away.

At the beginning of December, it came to light that one of my lovely, charming (apparently functionally retarded) boys decided it would be a good idea to use his pocket knife to carve large, satisfying chunks out of both the banisters and some of the other woodwork in the stairwell.   I’m pretty sure we won’t be able to fix the banisters, and fixing the woodwork calls for Bondo, sanding and repainting.  If you are imagining that I was not pleased, you are correct

Three weeks after that, I noticed all these weird notches in the door jam in the kitchen.  Closer inspection revealed the notches to be made by a blade of some sort.  Solving the mystery was not difficult:  the door jam is about 12 inches away from the knife block, and there was only one kid who had emptied the dishwasher the entire month of December.  Again, I was not pleased.

To my greater displeasure, it turned out to be a different kid than the child responsible for the banister debacle.

This morning I was cleaning the bathroom that is most frequented by the male types of my household.  As I was scrubbing the inevitable pee off the floor around the toilet, I discovered that, yes indeed, someone had peed in the air vent.

At which point I marveled that my life has come to this.

And then I wondered if stuff like this happens to other people, and they just don’t talk about it, or if I’m really as alone as I feel.

Did I wait for the kids to come home and clean the air vent?  Hell no.  Because A) no one in their right mind is ‘fessing up to that and B)  whoever got stuck cleaning it up would do a shit job that I’d have to come back and redo once they either went to bed or to school.  So I just did it myself.

When I finished that lovely little chore, I leaned over to get the chewed gum that had missed the garbage can and dried onto the tile.  That was when I discovered the straw (read “carving”) that will break the camel’s (read “my”) back.

And now I find myself gearing up for the following conversation:

“Who carved the perfectly symmetrical star into wall next to the toilet?”

I.  Am.  Not.  Pleased.