Guard Dogs

I’ve been reading numerous articles in magazines recently about people who rent out dogs that are trained to guard homes against theft.

Because there have been several robberies in the neighborhood, my husband suggested that we rent a dog to keep from being robbed. However, it didn’t take me long to convince him that with four kids in the house, renting a guard dog to keep burglars away is about as necessary as taking the pill when you’re pregnant.

First of all, a burglar would never get in through our windows. For one thing, they’ve been stuck shut since we had them painted four years ago. For another, we’ve got metal bars across them, which probably gives the neighbors funny ideas about the kind of place we run here, but it does keep my son from climbing out onto the window sills, which is what we had in mind when we had them installed.

Obviously, therefore, a burglar would have to get in through the door. Now, I don’t know what it’s like in normal households, but all the entrances to our house are booby-trapped with such an assortment of toy cars, trucks, baseball bats, hockey sticks, school bags, hats, skates and boots, a commando with radar would never make it to the front hall.

It’s just as well. My son has developed an annoying habit of demanding a toy from anyone who sets foot inside the door. In the past eighteen months, it’s cost my husband and daughters $286.49 just to come in and eat dinner every night, and word must have gone out through the underworld that it wouldn’t be worth the price of admission to try to swipe anything around here.

I won’t even mention the fact that the last one in at night has to put all the bicycles, tractors, wagons, cars and trucks back in the garage, put out the garbage and the empty milk bottles, and take the baby to the toilet.

By the time he finishes doing all that, your average thief would be too tired to do anything but go home and lie down for a month.

Anybody wanna rent a kid?

School Daze

Recently, yet another article appeared in a local newspaper labeling our education system inferior and obsolete.

Now, I know people have been saying that our schools are going to pot and other hallucinogenic drugs, and that they spawn illiterates who can barely read their own protest signs, while all over the world little Russian girls spout formulae in nuclear physics and little Chinese boys air theories in advanced thermonuclear dynamics. I’ll admit that none of my children can divide by nine, and that I get letters from summer camp whose spelling couldn’t be deciphered by the CIA.

But when I think of how faithfully each year, on the first day after Labor Day, our schools open their doors to every child in the country over five, my heart overflows with gratitude and I’m perfectly willing to overlook any small imperfections in the education system.

You see, the fact that sticks in my mind above all else is that come September (with due allowances for religious holidays and teachers’ conventions), the children won’t be in my kitchen making hand puppets out of all my garbage bags; they’ll be taken out of my hair and into the school system for at least five hours a day by the gallant men and women who teach in our public schools.

I say at least five hours a day. If I’m really lucky, one of my kids will develop a behavior problem or a tendency to fail in arithmetic. Then, what with detentions and extra help in long division, she might not get home until it’s time to give her her supper and put her to bed.

If I could only convince her to join the Latin Club and play the recorder in the school orchestra, it just might be possible to keep her shut up in that schoolhouse from sunrise to sunset.

Our youngest daughter goes to school half days only, but any mother will agree that a morning away from a five-year-old is like a month in Miami. The baby doesn’t go to school at all, but with the other three out of the house, there’s only one of him and one of me, and with those odds, even I can cope.

The trouble is, children don’t know what to do with leisure time. Torn from their orderly routine, they lie around all day in their pajamas working peanut butter into the dining room rug and whining that they have nothing to do. They have enough toys to stock a small department store, every one of which has been strewn around the living room for the past two months. Each child has her own bedroom and there’s a playroom in the basement, but when we suggest that they go there, we’re greeted with such howls of indignation, you’d think we were trying to ship them off to Vladivostok for the winter.

To top it all off, they got sick. All of them, at once. Now, I’m used to sickness. It’s been my proud boast that in the first ten years of motherhood I never had a child out of diapers or off medication. But when they’re all sick at the same time, it takes something out of you. The trice daily line-ups for medicine look like clinic calls at summer camp, and the constant steam from the vaporizers gives the entire house the aura of a prosperous shirt laundry.

Ah, the relief, when they finally go back to school! Telephones, doorbells, television sets and refrigerator doors settle into their normal cacophonous routine. I serve a mere five or six meals a day, instead of one continuous unending banquet. It will probably take me only three or four months to catch up on my laundry, ironing, mending, dirty dishes and housecleaning. In other words, just in time to greet the little darlings when they start their Christmas vacation.

Driving Me Crazy

We just acquired a new car. Actually, I would have preferred a new washing machine. To tell the absolute truth, what I really wanted was a life membership in a diaper service company, but my husband pointed out that it would be cheaper to toilet train the baby.

I liked our old car. One scratch more or less simply added to its antique charm, so that when someone bumped into me in the Mall I could dismiss it with laughing good grace. I’ve acquired some of my best friends while comparing insurance statistics in the back seats of police cars.

But I have to admit, I had problems with our old car. I took it in for repairs so many times I started to worry about my children. Instead of coming home and playing with their dolls, my daughters swaggered around all day in their overalls, cursing like stevedores, and my son kept taking the hinges off all the kitchen cabinets.

Not that the new car is much better. The mileage on that car is now over 2000, most of it chalked up between my house and the car dealer. The trouble is that the man who waited on you hand and foot, who took you on all day sight-seeing excursions to test-drive the car, and offered lollipops to your children and bones to your dog, turns into a snarling ingrate the minute he has that deed of sale safely under lock and key.

When something goes wrong with that car, he doesn’t know you. Neither does anyone in what his company laughingly calls its service department. They pay a girl enormous sums of money just to intercept your calls and keep you from getting through to anyone who can help you.

By far the biggest problem is that we bought a five-seat car and we are a six-seat family. Trips to the corner grocery store are a nightmare. Out of town excursions are out of the question, which I suspect was my husband’s preconceived plan to get out of visiting my mother. But whenever I complain, he simply offers me a choice: I can either buy a second car or continue to eat three meals a day.

But basically, because he’s a kind-hearted soul, and has an understandable desire to stop my howls of anguish before the neighbors call the police, he finally agreed to let me have the car all day and take the train to the office.

He took the train to work all right, but guess who had to take him to the train station? And at 6:30 in the morning, yet, when every decent human being except my four children was lying safely asleep in her bed!

There was also the question of who got the car at night. It’d be my turn to drive the girls to our canasta game, and he’d take the car, returning in the wee hours with just enough fuel left in the tank to get me halfway to the nearest gas station in the morning.

“But the car is yours,” he’d protest, when I objected.

You bet it’s mine. Mine to wash, and change the tires; mine to fill with gas and oil. Mine to outfit with license plates and insurance policies, and mine to do all the household errands in, that he can no longer do because, “After all, you have the car all day.”

I’d go back to taking the bus, but there’s something too unnerving about watching my kids stare fixedly at the person sitting across the aisle and shriek in voices loud enough to shatter glass, “Mum, is that man a man or a lady?”

There’s no help for it. I’ll simply have to go on, chauffeuring children, bicycles, dogs, neighbors, trees and drainage pipes, while my husband looks askance at every dented fender and gum-filled ashtray.

But I’m plotting my revenge. As soon as I earn my first million, I’m going to buy him a limo and a chauffeur’s cap. Then I’ll back-seat drive him all the way to the funny farm.