When your kid's "private area" is a cardboard box.

My kids watch way too much tv.  I know it, and I feel bad about it.  But I've been sick and trying desperately to rest so that I can be unsick because there are only so many times that I can ask my husband to please pick up his jeans from the dining room floor before I start to explode.  I am no Martha Stewart, but my house looks like a bomb hit it worse than usual this past week.  I've been putting away toys, washing dishes that have been left on the counter, walking the dogs, making the kids lunches and snacks, and occasionally remembering to take my own medicine so I don't cough myself into oblivion. I have had a fever for 5 days, but I tested negative for the flu.  I'm dying, but it's ok, because apparently I don't have the flu.

You don't really realize how much little stuff you do until you have to ask your husband to do something EVERY THREE SECONDS.  "Can you walk the dogs real quick?"  "Can you grab O a snack?"  "Can you get M his water?"  "M spilled his water - can you grab a paper towel?"  "Did you walk the dogs yet?"  ... "You still haven't walked the dogs?"  And you get tired of asking, so finally you do it yourself.  And then you're not resting, and you wonder why you're not getting any better.  Of course, you should have just done it in the first place, but your husband said he'd do it, so you actually thought he'd, you know, do it.

And then after rescheduling the swim classes, dentist appointments, playgroups, and music classes for the week that you can't go to because you're sick, you finally get to lay down and rest, and your husband decides it's time to build a shelving unit for his desk.  Right now.  (He still hasn't walked the dogs.)

And you lay on the couch, and your two-year-old decides to sit on your head.

But the good news is that your 5-year-old has asked if he can have a big cardboard box.  The box isn't huge - it housed and delivered a 17.5 pound bag of dog food.  "Sure, why not?"  So he starts playing in the box.  Dad comes in and says something about how this could be his private little area.  After he's been playing in the box for a while, I suggest that he decorate it.  He gets excited and grabs markers, scissors, tape, and other craft goodies.  After a while, from the other room, I hear, "Mom!  I'm drawing on my private area!"

The kid has now spent several days before and after school hanging out in and decorating his box, and it looks pretty cool in there.  He's drawn windows, made and hung pictures, and drawn a bunch of other stuff he excitedly explained to me and I pretended to be super impressed about at the time but now I have no idea what it was.

So I shouldn't have been surprised when I got an email from his teacher yesterday recounting to me the following: "O told another teacher today that he had marker on his hands because he was coloring 'in his private area' this morning. The teacher brought it to my attention, and when I asked him he said, 'I color in my private area every day!' I asked where it was and he said 'in my dining room; it's a special box I go in sometimes!' He is too funny!"

At least he's not watching tv.  And my husband's shelves look great, thanks for asking.

...

Hey, how come he gets a private area and I can't even sit on the toilet without an audience?  Probably the same reason that I will have this non-flu until 2032.  (That's the year he graduates high school.)