Eleven Rules I Never Thought I’d Make at My House

Eleven Rules I never thought I’d make at my house:

1. No dirty Navy songs at the dinner table.
2. No gory stories to the children of missing limbs, bloody faces, missing ears from your years as a paramedic and a cop.
3. No getting out of the car in the Starbucks parking lot. (No wandering where there are cars)
4. No flipping off or shaking your fist at annoying drivers.
5. No using the word ‘shutup”, there are nicer ways to get your point across. (This one for my mom who gets frustrated with my Dad)
6. No Ben Gay without supervision (This after my Dad rubbed it all over his face for moisturizing.
7. No midnight trips to the bathroom without the walker or cane (This results in middle-of-the-night drama with paramedics, firefighters, and hospital trips.)
8. No tapping or pushing the dogs with your cane.
9. No baths, only showers. (My Dad is unable to get out of the tub alone, resulting in a whole lot of dangerous lifting in wet slippery circumstances. I tell my Mom no baths and yet each night I hear her tell my Dad she left her water for him.)
10. No lecturing Henry and his friends on the perils of drunk driving as neither drinking nor driving is even on their radar because they are 11.
11. Swimsuits or clothing required at the pool: no underwear (“Dad, you have a bathing suit, why are you wearing your underwear to the pool?” Because. “Dad, your underwear is on backwards!” The Hell it is!
12. Please  double check with me if you think something in the kitchen is whipped cream. A few days ago, he took a big handful of Annabelle’s slime and ate it. It did look a lot like whipped cream but was actually glue, contact lens solution and shaving cream. The next night, he was putting spray sunscreen on his face at 8pm, when asked why, he said, “To make myself beautiful”. When I turned back around he was spraying the can in his mouth. He quickly hobbled over to the sink to spit it out, and I gave him ice cream to get the taste out of his mouth. He skipped over the ice cream bowl and took a big spoonful of slime again. Needless to say there’s no more slime or sunscreen allowed in the kitchen.