Friday, July 31, 2009

What Little Girls Are Made Of...


Sugar and spice and everything nice, right? Ed would disagree. I think Ed would have liked to be an only child, or the youngest in the family. He didn’t particularly enjoy being the oldest brother of three younger sisters, or at least the older brother of Hipee and me. ED is almost 15 years older than our youngest brother, Pretty Boy, so by the time he came along, ED was ready to go.

ED normally kept his room very clean and organized. While I am now considered to be a very neat and clean adult, I wasn’t as a child. Hipee wasn’t either. Our shared room was usually a mess until we were forced to clean it up. ED’s room was a paragon of organization. He had a place for everything and everything in its place. This meant that we always knew where ED would keep his stuff, like the chocolate bars he hide in the bottom drawer on the right-hand side of his desk.

Yes, we stole chocolate from ED. I stole chocolate from ED. Shamelessly. I was the worst. He would buy chocolate, and put it in the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk, without any security concerns or stealth involved. What was ED thinking? This would be another clue that although ED wasn’t dumb, he wasn’t an Einstein either. I mean, come on… Chocolate candy bars left in the same drawer every time with two younger sisters in the house who were known chocolate thieves. Everyone knows that stashes of chocolate need a hiding place.

Today I still “hide” the chocolate but everyone in my family knows where it is hidden. I’m good with that now. Sometimes they can help me find it if I've forgotten the hiding place. Actually the best hiding place is in plain sight. I had a large bag of peanut MM’s sitting right out in the center of the pantry and no one touched them for months. I finally had to set them out on the kitchen counter in order to get people to see them and eat them. This was done when we were loading a moving truck with help from friends and I needed to either clean up what was left in the pantry or pack it.

But poor ED just never quite got the idea that you might need to hide your chocolate, or switch around where you put it, especially with sisters in the house. A youngest child could get away with this behavior, but the status of the oldest in the family is much more of a dog eat dog position and ED needed a reality check. I tried to help give him a clue that he should hide his candy bars, but, alas, he just never got it. He could yell all he wanted about sister’s invading his room and violating his stuff, but at the end of the day his chocolate was still gone and his sisters had no money to replace it.

Never fear though, ED was eventually compensated for his loss. Several years ago Hipee and I bought enough candy bars to fill up a medium-sized box and gave them to ED for Christmas. He was very pleased. We don’t know if ED hid the candy bars from his wife. We do know that after he opened the gift, he kept that box in sight at all times, didn’t offer anyone anything in it, and whisked it out and into his locked truck ASAP. ED may have learned a lesson after all.

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