A mouthful of soda...

I was sitting on my doorstep one day having my lunch and keeping an eye of the kids playing in the street.

The kids had gravitated towards me and my daughter, aged about 6, or 7, decided to show off her new cartwheeling skills. Before she was even upside down I had clocked the trajectory of her leading foot would land on my plate.

Times were hard, food an unpredictable commodity and I was bloody well hungry.

Quick as a flash I grabbed my lunch off the plate microseconds before my daughter's booted extremity landed square and left me stunned, half a delectable sandwich in one hand, a quarter of a favourite 1950's plate in the other.

There was a moment of silence where one might have heard a penny dropping. I could have just moved the feckin' plate.

At this point I dissolved into shrieks of laughter at my stupidity, rolling around on the floor, still holding the half sandwich and fractured piece of crockery, the rest scattered around me, shards in my mug of tea.

The kids stood and stared. After a moment, or two of observing my aberrant madness, one perplexed child piped up, "My mum would have shouted at me" and the others, "Mine, too", or nodded their assent.

Gasping for breath I explained how the idiocy was mine - I could see and predict what was going to happen, but still acted without sense; my daughter didn't yet have the skills to predict such distances and consequences.

She was the only child who saw the funny side, all the others drifted away back to their own mothers, disconcerted. I had shaken their sense of security of how the world worked and they didn't like it one bit.

Way back in the day when my son was young - maybe 6 or 7 years old, he kept nailing me with a squirt gun. All day long, every time I turned around, I was getting a face full of water and a laugh from him and one of his friends (this friend practically lived at our house). I was making dinner when he came into the kitchen and I got my revenge. I had him cornered between the sink, the stove and me. I nailed him with the water sprayer from the kitchen sink. There was water everywhere and one heck of a mess to clean up but it was worth every single second of it. We all laughed during dinner and I don't remember being bothered with a water gun again.

You have to have some fun with your kids. You can't always be angry or they grow up being angry too.

Even these days, my son and his girlfriend will take the girls out back (in the summer of course) for a water balloon fight. I have learned to keep a bucket of water balloons of my own in my room. So far, I have managed to launch an aerial attack from the 2nd fl - 2 or 3 times without the little ones knowing where they are coming from.
I toss them out and duck behind the window. Someday, they'll figure it out but for now, it's fun!