Things I Thought I Would Never Say #6

It was a Sunday afternoon.

I was laying on the couch watching a NASCAR race. My guys were losing. Carl Edwards was running 24th and Schrader was in the garage after having got caught up in someone else's wreck. I was half paying attention.

The kids were picking up their stuff out of the living room. This seems almost to be a constant process. Their stuff seems to migrate endlessly to the living room from their bedrooms and the garage.

I am laying there and I see these shorts on the floor. I reach over and pick them up. They seem inordinately small. The whole fabric is about the size of my hand.

"Whose are these?" I ask incredulously. I'm thinking that who ever claims them, they aren't ever wearing them again if I have anything to say about it.

"They belong to the teddy bear, Mark," Emily answers in that "almost a teenager" sarcasm-laced voice that I've become accustomed to lately. She gestures at a small gray bear laying nearby on the living room floor as she picks up another bundle of stuff and carries it back to their room.

I pick up the bear and slip the shorts on it.

"Ah," I think relieved that the shorts are the bear's and not something that one of the girls are wearing out into the world.

Then, I notice that the bear's shorts have an open fly...a gaping open fly. And I'm thinking, "Why in the world does this thing need an open fly like that?"

And of course, being a man, I check to make sure he isn't anatomically correct.

Nope, nothing there.

Hmmm...so I asked, "What's the hole in this teddy bear's shorts for?"

And darling, growing up way too fast, Emily responded, "His tail. Duh, Mark. You put them on him backwards."

She snatched her bear from me and took him back to her bedroom.

"Oh," I said and laid back down to watch the race in the slightly embarrassed silence that follows.

puff