Parents are proud of the weirdest things!

Good morning all!

When you become a parent, you lose all logic as to what makes you proud.  There are things all parents are proud of in their children:  Good grades, any sort of awards, an athletic accomplishment, a kid who wakes for school without a series of sonic booms for an alarm.  And then there's a whole closet of weird stuff that sort of makes our parental chests swell with illogical pride.

The other day I came home and Peaches, Skippy, and one of Peaches friends, we'll call him Buddy, were sitting in the living room.  The TV was off.

This raised an immediate red flag for me.

"We have a surprise for you,"  Says Skippy in a very, very cheerful voice.

More red flags.

He then walked me into the kitchen. On the counter sat the laptop computer.  He turned on the computer.

And there was something really, really wrong with the screen.

I'd never seen those big black ink spots before.

"We were goofing around and I jumped onto Peaches' lap and she had the computer on her side and I landed on it in an awkward way."

Now as a parent, you've got two choices in a situation like this.Typically I lose my mind and shriek for about fifteen minutes.   Except, and this is something I brought to mind the moment Skippy showed me the computer:

I've never yelled at the kids for breaking anything expensive before.

In the files of my mental Rolodex I went through all the electronics the kids have had access to and I realized they haven't broken or lost any of them.  Ipods?  Phones?  Computers?  The car?

None of them.

(Okay, the car got broken three times in Skippy's care, but each of those times he wasn't in the car, it was parked in a lot or a driveway, and someone hit him.  So I really can't fault him for that.)

That's when I took a deep breath and said, "Well, it's really your father's computer.  You'll have to tell him what you did."

So we then all sat down in the living room with the TV off and waited a bit for Hubby to come home.  He knew instantly something was wrong when he walked in.  I'm never in the living room when the TV is off.

Skippy went through the whole speech again with him.  And, to Hubby's credit, he didn't howl either.  (He rarely does.  The kids figured if I didn't kill them, they were home free.)

Later, when the kids were gone at their various activities, and I was pondering how proud I was of them for not trying to hide the broken computer, I heard hubby laughing.  He called me into to the office.  There, on the main computer, the first screen that came up when he signed in was a Google page of sites to visit when you need to fix a laptop computer screen.

Yep, the kids were trying to be resourceful.

Brings to mind my very first car accident and how I tried to cover that up.

But that's a story for another day.

Now, lest you think my kids are all the way grown up and responsible, as we were remarking how responsible they'd been, I got a text from Skippy. He was at a book store and wanted to know if I would pay for some of the books he was picking out.  (Our deal is I pay half for books, but nothing for games, Cd's, or anything like that.)

My response:  Computer screen...

His response:  Oh yeah.  I forgot.

So we've got a ways to go.  But for now, I'm pretty proud.  Proud of my computer screen breaking kids.

Parents are weird.