The $5 House

Friday night was the fundraiser "fun night" at Sara's school. Fun for the kids. Expensive, giant pain in the butt for the parents. Spend an insane amount of money on tickets so your kid can jump in some inflatble house, play dumb games and eat junk food. Oh, and try to keep an eye on your kid in a sea of K-5th graders while she runs off every time they blare a Justin Beiber song. I vow to all that I will slit that singer's throat if I ever meet him. I don't know who is more annoying - him or his fans. It's a toss-up. Hundreds of shrieking girls singing and dancing to "Never" is going to give me nightmares for a long time.

I was assigned the dubious honor of being "prize walk coordinator". This arduous task involved me taking tickets from kids, letting walk around in a circle until I yelled stop and picked a color for the winner. I gotta tell you. I got a little giddy with the power. I have never seen so many middle-class kids get so jazzed up to win some "free" junk. I was flinging candy at them so they would go away. When we arrived, I handed Sara a wad of tickets and told her to behave and have fun. She rolled her eyes, thanked me fore the tickets and took off like I shot her out of a cannon. I decided to splurge and spend $5 on a raffle ticket. I support the school so I figured it was a good thing to do. My choices were an iPod and a playhouse. Since we own more iPods than people live in our house, I tossed my ticket in the playhouse bowl. The last thing I won was a clock-radio in 3rd grade that broke 3 days after I got it. As I was diligently performing my "prize walk coordinator" duties, they suddenly announced that I was the proud winner of the playhouse. I screamed, flung my color cards at some child, tripped over the candy bowl and ran to claim my prize. I think there are still kids walking in a circle waiting for me to yell "stop".

Next came the 'fun' part for me. Calling my husband to tell him we won a house. This is how that conversation went:

"Honey, we won a house!"

Long pause and annoyed sigh on his end. Then, "Really? I'm giving Christian his bath. I don't have time for this."

Indignant and amused, I replied, "No, really. We just won a playhouse for $5."
I can hear the wheels turning in his brain. "Are you kidding? Where are we going to put it? It probably violates neighborhood bylaws."

Playing Scarlett O'Hara, I charmingly say, "We can worry about that tomorrow. By the way, it's being delivered in 15 minutes. Can you move your car out of the driveway? That's where he needs to park it."

He hung up at that point.

We now have a playhouse in our backyard. I'm trying to convince him that it should be "my time-out space". I think he's considering it because he discovered it can be locked from the outside.