“Help!” screamed Miss12. “Dad!”
I raced through the house, expecting extra elbows or blood stains on the carpet. Instead, she was standing in the middle of her room staring at the door as I thundered through.
“What?!”
“I can’t find my shoes,” she said.
The word eff was going off in my head like fireworks on the last night of the local show, but somehow I managed to filter them out before the sentence came out my mouth.
“Why would you scream like that? I thought you were dying!”
“You wouldn’t have come if I said it normally.”
She had a point.
“But now you’re here,” she grinned cheekily, “I can’t find my shoes.”
“Have you tried looking where you took them off yesterday?” I sighed.
“Da-aad,” she said, in a tone with cast serious doubts about my ability to adult while throwing in a massively expressive eye-roll I suspect she picked up from me, “I’m not stupid.” Okay, so that she must get from her mother.
“So where did you take them off?”
“In here,” she said. “And then I put them in my cupboard.”
“So what are you thinking?” I wanted to know. “They went for a run by themselves?”
“Dad! Help me!” she said, back to bellowing. “I need to get to school.”
I needed her to get to school too.
“Found them,” I called out, fifteen seconds later.
They were on a seat in the dinning room.
“How did they get there?” mumbled Miss12, shoving them on her feet before grabbing her backpack and racing out to her bike. She really was in a hurry because she didn’t have time to say thank you.
“Yes, I wonder?” I said loudly.
“Someone must have moved them,” she decided.
“Have you ever seen any of your brothers or sisters pick something up off the floor without being asked?” I called after her.
“I told you,” she shot back, pushing her bike out the gate, “they weren’t on the floor, they were in the cupboard!”
Dammit, she was right. And her siblings are always pulling effing stuff out of their effing cupboards. It was the perfect cover story.
Again, I self-filtered.
“Good point,” I said and retreated into the house.
She’s twelve. I suspect I’m in for a rough six years. Help!
“Raising a family on little more than laughs”
