Foiled Again!
The day we left the cell phone store with our new smartphones, practically skipping back to the car, happy to be free from our circa 1990’s toaster-sized, old-school, beater phone, my once-excited husband suddenly had a look of horror washed over his face.
“We have to hide these.”
I stopped skipping walking right in the middle of the parking lot, causing my happily-swinging-alongside-me shopping bag to thwack me in the thigh. Ow. “What are you talking about, ‘hide‘ them?”
“Yes, hide them. From the children.”
And then the lightbulb went off *DING*, and I knew just how smart a statement that was. “Yes! Good point, babe. Quickly, put it in your pocket before they see you.”
“They” being, our heat-seeking-missile toddlers who were waiting in the car with their older sister. You see, if there’s an electronics device within reach, it will be in their hands in .3 seconds flat.
“Mommy? Wha’dya get?” sayeth toddler numero uno.
“Nothing baby, we’re leaving now. We got nothing. Nothing at all.”
She could smell the fear. I knew my shiny new phone’s days were numbered.
“But you has a bag, dere, momma. Wha’s in it? Did you get a new pone?” she says, pointing to the eleventy-thousand signs that showcase the store we just came from.
I couldn’t turn around to see the sad panda eyes I knew she was shooting me. You know, the eyes that get her ice cream before bedtime, or candy for breakfast? Yeah, those.
“No baby, they didn’t have any phones for us. So they gave us this bag inste-”
Wait a cotton’ pickin’ minute, I thought to myself. Am I seriously lying to my toddler? For what, exactly? What’s she going to do, nuke it? Set it on fire? Okay, so maybe she might chuck it at her brother’s head— but really, we got a handy-dandy case for it, we have a screen protector, what could she possibly do?
And then, before I even turned around, those sad panda eyes filtered into my bleeding heart osmosis-like, and made me give her the damn phone. Without thinking. Without rational thought. And I’ll give you two guesses what happened next.
Thermonuclear Toddler War. (Two toddlers, one phone. You know how it goes.)
I reluctantly shot my husband my panda eyes in an effort to get him to fork over his shiny new phone to toddler number two.
He responded with a look of his own. You know the look. The one that says I-told-you-so, I’m-gonna-kick-your-ass-for-this-one, you-know-we-just-paid-$500-for-toddler-toys?
Yeah. That.