Missing Remote

The remote to our basement TV has been missing for weeks.  To be real honest, we haven't missed it much.  We just don't watch TV down there very often.  When we are down there, we're playing.  The basement is the stash for almost every toy, game and activity the kids own.  It's heaven for the kids, which makes upstairs, heaven for me.  There's rarely a toy in sight up there, which often give me the false assumption that our house is clean...at least upstairs :)  

As of last Sunday, we also lost the remote for our upstairs TV.  Now, this is a catastrophe!  Once again, the kids haven't missed it much...because they're usually downstairs playing.  Matt and I, on the other hand, NEED to watch TV at night after the kids go to bed.  It's one of my favorite times of the day...sitting in one place for more than 5 minutes, doing something that requires nothing of me except lounging on the couch in my jammies, snuggled up next to Matt with my favorite blanket.  I look forward to 9 o'clock p.m. almost as soon as my feet hit the floor every morning :)  

Now, I like to play tricks on my husband and the kids.  It runs on my mom’s side of the family.  I learned how to torment others from my great uncle, Joe.  He’d put me on top of the refrigerator and leave the kitchen.  I’d sit there and scream.  He laughed.  He taught me well…everytime Matt leaves his socks on the floor; I put them in his pillowcase.  I don't know which he notices first...that his pillow is lumpy or he's missing socks.  I have wrapped up a broken Nintendo DS for Nate before when he was expecting a new one.  Of course, when he opened it, he knew I was joking and then I whipped out the new one.  If you know us at all, you may recall that Gabe is terrified of lobsters in the toilet.  I thought it would help ease his fears if I taped a picture of a lobster to the back of the toilet.  It helped for a while.  But, his new fear is a Black Mamba coming into his room in the middle of the night. 

 There is this little TV table thing that I’m NOT fond of.  There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, other than being small and it tips over easily.  This is not the best kind of furniture to have when you’ve got 3 young kids in the house.  Matt likes it because he can slide it right up to the couch and sit the remote and/or his drink or snack on it when we’re sharing our Q-time at the end of the day.  Several weeks back, I got a coffee table.  Thinking that we could do away with the dinky side table, I put it in the closet.  But, for some reason, every few nights, I see Matt fish it out of the closet and sit it right next to the couch. He often joked, “Why do you keep moving my table?”  I responded, every time, with “What table?” 

Why am I telling you this?  Well, for the last week, I’ve been thinking that Matt is teasing me with the remote…he’s paying me back for hiding his table!  So every night that we look for it, I say, “Just go get it and we can watch TV!”  He responds with a quirky grin, explaining that he had nothing to do with the missing remote.  Little did I know, someone was teasing me...but it wasn't Matt!

I was chatting with Matt this morning about how I have spent the last 2 days, searching every crevice of the house, looking for at least 1 of the remotes.  His solution...tell the kids there has been a family emergency!  Tell them we will not being doing anything until the remotes are found!  I giggled because of his choice words...family emergency.  I didn't realize, however, how powerful they would be to a 3 year old.  

Adri wanted to watch Dora this afternoon and I told her that we couldn't watch it because the remote was missing.  She laughed a suspicious laugh.  I've asked her and the boys at least 10 times each if they knew where the remote was...every response was no!  I told her that a missing remote was a family emergency…just like Matt said.  I let her know that all activities would cease until that little device was found.  She started to cry, apologizing, continuously, for the lost remote.  Sobbing, she runs to her room and starts pulling out stuff from under her bed that I haven’t seen since we moved here…the cover to the Wii remote, a whistle, some of the boys’ legos…and the TV remote!  She’s still sobbing.  She was trying to be a jokester by hiding it (she gets it from her mom), but apparently, my comment about having a family emergency made her think that a missing remote is no joking matter!  She explained that she didn’t want the police to come and take her away and lock her in a cage and that she didn’t want their dogs to eat Keely.  She was just trying to be funny.  Where does she get these ideas? 

I guess the Parisi family love for teasing didn’t end with me.  It continues with Adrianna…at least it did until today!  I think I may have broke the cycle and scared some normality into her!