The roof

My girls do this thing. They let their room get dirty - disgustingly dirty. And then, in conspiratorial camaraderie they make a show of sneaking upstairs, telling me they have a surprise in store. Only two little girls aged 8 and 5 could make a show of sneaking off.

Anyway. They did this the other day. I assumed that in 20 minutes they would call me upstairs while proclaiming their room was "messier than even before" only to surprise and delight me with their newly cleaned quarters.

They didn't. I finally meandered up to see what was going on and the room was still the pits.

Mae admitted later that they got sidetracked. The weather was so lovely and the air smelled like spring, they opened the windows. They wrote secret messages on paper airplanes and threw them out their second story window.

It melted my heart. It was so darling. Two little girls, two sisters, throwing paper airplanes out the window.

And then yesterday happened.

I jogged home from work yesterday during a break in the rain. I stepped over soggy paper airplanes as I entered the front door. I took the baby from the sitter, I assumed my position in the kitchen and sauteed onions, chopped carrots, cooked up lentil soup. And the doorbell rang.

It's late now, and I've been giving oral exams in Spanish and taking care of a sick baby and reading for an hour to the girls and I don't have the brain power to turn this into narrative genius. So I'll just out with it.

The girls were on the roof. They were ON THE ROOF. They weren't cutely tossing innocent little paper airplanes out their cutely curtained white painted windows. They climbed out through the crumbling lead paint covered frame onto our newly replaced patch of roof and climbed to the little peak that looks out over our front stairs and THREW AIRPLANES TO THE FRONT YARD. FROM THE ROOF.

My neighbors saw them. They were horrified. I thanked them profusely for letting me in on the girls' secret. I didn't yell. I didn't take away Saturday ipad or Friday night movie. I figured for something this serious I should do something I never ever do under any other circumstance: I spoke to them calmly. I told them about the dangers of climbing on a roof.

I think we're in the clear now. I think they'll stay where they belong. But just in case, Chris and I have decided to put together a little homemade, hand illustrated Edward Gorey style book called: 30 ways you can die by falling off the roof.