What's Next?: If He Would Just Wear His Boots....

Some misadventures can start with the best of intentions that go terribly awry. A chain of events that flows down a dark path filled with wrong turns and growing lies.

Liam-the-thirteen-year-old-boy owns a pair of great winter boots; like new, rarely been worn. We have ..... oh..... let's call it 3 feet of snow everywhere. Liam wears his running shoes, always, and they are therefore always wet and in some state of putrid molding. Since I choose to pick my battles and I have long since decided that I don't have a hope in hell of winning the boot one, I tell him that he must dry his shoes or they will most assuredly rot his feet off at the ankles.

Good intention: he put his god-forsaken, disgusting shoes in the dryer. Good intention: he attempted to wipe the dirt and grit out of the dryer when he was finished.

At that point a poor decision was made. Liam thought that he would be more successful in gathering all of the dirt in one area if he manually turned the drum of the dryer so that it would all fall into one place. Of course, being a mini-man, the resistance he felt when trying to turn the drum only made him push harder, forcing the drum to turn rather than consider that maybe said resistance meant that it should really not be turned.

The drum finally gave with a large metallic klang and Liam, then satisfied, continued to contentedly wipe out the dryer.

Me, then at the top of the stairs, "Liam, what was that noise?"

You all know the response to that one.

Liam, "What noise?"

Me, "That loud klang noise that came from right where you are..... right now."

Liam, "I'm really not sure."

Me, "Well, what were you doing when the noise happened?"

Liam explained to me how he had turned the drum to clean out the dryer, of course.

Me, "I don't think that was the right noise for the dryer to make. Can you see if it's still working?"

Liam, shrugged, "Sure."

He turned it on, the motor ran, he turned it off and yelled up that it was working fine.

After a couple of days had passed and I had enough time to do a load of laundry, I walked down the stairs towards the washer only to be met with numerous articles of clothing hanging like ghouls from every protuberance along my path.

Suspicious, I thought to myself. I suspected that perhaps the dryer was, in fact, not working and neither of my darling spawn wanted to be the one to get me up to speed. What a surprise.

My powers of deduction had not failed me. Though the dryer motor would run, that loud klang probably belonged to something that needed to be functioning to make the drum turn.

It occurred to me that Liam should possibly be reprimanded for breaking the dryer but, how many teenaged boys would have attempted to clean it out at all. He should have told me that it was broken but, he said that he really didn't know why his clothes weren't drying since the dryer was still making noise. I believe him.

So, I did what any exasperated parent would do. I threw the shoes in the garbage and headed downstairs with a screwdriver and a socket set.