Errand Boy

My latest confession is that I love to use my children as servants. 

But to my defense, I think this horrible lazy streak of mine just can’t be helped.  After all, my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather was the bastard child of a Plantagent King.  Which quite possibly means I inherited my slothful need to have a staff of little people to order around--it’s in my genes.

In fact, I’ve seriously considered installing a row of servant bells and assigning one to each child in the house, thus invoking my royal prerogative.

All my kids have been sent on errands.  Mostly the “I’m-upstairs-and-you’re-downstairs-so-could-you-bring-me-something-er-other” type of errand.  Or  the converse problem; “I’m-downstairs-and-you’re-upstairs-could-you-bring-me-the-whatshamacallit-pretty-please” errand.

My kids are pretty good at obliging my odd requests without even letting out a groan.  They just run and do it knowing that it’s just what you do when you have a lazy mom.

Three of my kids are really good at it.  You can ask them to run up or down the stairs in search for the most detailed minuscule thing and they’ll scurry along and bring it back.  My oldest, Cheyenne, was even so good that she could figure out what I was asking for without even waiting for me to finish my sentence.  Mitchell will think ahead and make sure anything else remotely related to the needed object is also brought too, just in case.  And Chloe--no request is too hard, you can ask her to bring a specific color lint ball from an obscure pocket resting in the bowels of a laundry hamper and she will find it and bring it to you.

Then there’s Connor.  Frankly, he's one kid who just doesn’t have the attention span for the odd errand. He listens long enough to ascertain the place to which he must go, but never long enough to actually hear what he is to look for once he gets there.

I think he hears something like a mixture of English and what I like to call "Charile Brown teacher".  Something like,

“Connor, could you run upstairs and Wha-Wha Wha Wha Wha?”

At this point the Connor will bound up the stairs, spins a few circles, then come back down and say, “Wha’d you say??”

I'll re-explain it.  He'll return empty handed and perplexed.

He’ll usually do this two or three times before I just go up/down and get whatever it is myself.

Now it’s become sort of a ruse around our house.  We find his methods so amusing and so he has become everyone’s preferred page, our favorite errand boy, because it’s so funny to see him always return empty handed with his eyebrows raised in total confusion.

But I think last night he finally caught on to our little scheme that sometimes Mark and I will send him for stuff we don't really need just to amuse ourselves--because when I asked him to go downstairs and get something out of my car.  He quickly disappeared and when he returned, instead of coming back empty handed as usual and asking for a do-over, his arms were loaded with everything he could find inside my car.  Every stinkin’ thing...and one hilarious admission.

He said, "I don't remember what you asked for but I'm sure I got it here somewhere!"

That's my little errand boy.