Freedom for the garden gnome

Oldest girl-child was really the kid that caused me the most amount of grief.  I mean, it was much different than the issues with step-daughter.  That is a kind of sadness about where her life is going.  Girl-child however, that was all stress and frustration and craziness.  Part of the problem is that I had no stress about my kids becoming teenagers before they were teenagers.  Everyone else I knew was suitably scared by the the prospect but I figured, hey, I’m an expert, I can deal with this.  Totally different when it’s your own kids.

It seems like my kids were little criminal wanna-be’s.  Girl-child # 1 was probably lucky she just never got caught at half the stuff she did.  Now, she was a good kid in the sense that she did eventually get over her year of skipping and go to school.  She passed most of her classes (other than math but that was directly related to the epilepsy and she did pass after taking the same class two or three times in a row each year), she was never a behavior problem in the school itself, she had a job that she was very good at and she generally did what she was told.  She also had a mind of her own and would get these crazy ideas in her head and think it would be funny to do whatever stupid thing she thought of. 

When she was still here, she had the bedroom with the under-the-stairs closet area that the girls loaded up for the zombiepocalypse night.  That little nook was full of signatures and pictures on the walls but it was also full of just ‘stuff’.  Somewhere along the way I started noticing odd little garden nomes popping up in there.  Gradually, they found their way into girl-child’s bedroom and hanging out in her car.  Curious me, I started asking questions about these little nomes.  Turns out, the kids (it wasn’t me mom, I swear) would start taking garden nomes from people’s gardens at night.  Since she was the only one with a car of her own then, they would cruise around and when the mood struck, sneak up and grab one.  And for some strange reason, they all ended up in my basement. 

Luckily, it was a short-lived stealing spree.  The end came when our next door neighbour had a little green frog that he had placed in his front garden.  One night, the frog went missing.  It wasn’t in the basement but he was a smart man and he pulled my girl aside and talked to her about how much he loved that little frog and how important it was to him and how he wouldn’t say a word or ask any questions but he just wanted the frog back.  The next night, the frog magically appeared back in his garden.  He never did say another word but there were no more garden nomes in my basement.