At Least Mali Lets Me THINK I Wear the Pants...

The last month has been pretty busy, especially after receiving the shipment of our household effects from Thailand and subsequently trying to get our house in order.  Our basement resembled that warehouse at the very end of Raiders of the Lost Ark--you know, the one where the elderly gentleman is shown wheeling a cart holding with a wooden crate, and the camera pulls back to reveal a vast ocean of faceless crates as the old man disappears into the morass.  The more I think about it, we're pretty fortunate that none of our kids got lost down there, we might not have been able to retrieve them.

So one morning as my oldest widget and I were leaving the house for seminary* I noticed that she was wearing my favorite pair of cargo pants, ones which I had assumed were in an as-yet-unopened moving box in the basement.  I asked her where she found them, and she casually said, "They were in my drawer."  No big deal, at least not to me.  After school, however, Mali wasn't totally thrilled about the idea of her high school aged daughter wearing man's army pants at school all day.

About a week or so ago I realized that I still hadn't found a couple more pair of my pants, so I asked said oldest widget if she might, perchance, happen to have a couple more pair of my trousers squirreled away in my drawer.  She was a little indignant, and assured me that no, none of her daddy's precious pants were in her drawers, she was sure of it.

Naturally that meant that my drawers were in fact secreted away in her drawers.  After assembling her brand-new IKEA chest of drawers I took it upon myself to look through her stuff, and there, underneath some of her sweaters, were my last two pairs of pants.  And the widget had the gall to look surprised that they were there!  Kids these days, I'm tellin' ya...

*Seminary, for those uninitiated in the mores of Mormon culture, is a wonderous and joyful experience wherein high school students, as if they weren't already sufficiently sleep-deprived, go to the church (or someone's house) about ninety minutes before school starts to have lessons about the scriptures.  And somebody thought it would be a great idea to have me teach this class...