A Curious Homecoming

“Whoa!”  I exclaimed when I walked in the door.  “Why is it so clean?”  The floor was spotless.  Not a single toy was on the ground, and it had clearly been swept and vacuumed.  This was not the way it usually looked when I got home from work.

My son slid sheepishly off his chair where he was eating a snack at the table and sort of slid-crept along the wall towards me in a way that let me know something had happened that he didn’t want to tell me about.

“Mommy,” he said.  “I’m going to show you something in my room, but don’t say anything to me.”  I laughed to myself–his father must have said plenty to him already. He continued inching along the wall until he was across from his bedroom door.

“What is it?”

He pointed towards the ceiling.  I was still taking off my shoes and couldn’t imagine what could have happened to the ceiling.  Did he squirt paint on the ceiling?  Did he make a hole somehow?  What happened?

I rounded the corner to his doorway, so curious, and looked up.  Two naked light bulbs stared down at me from the center of the ceiling where there used to be a glass light fixture. “Uh-oh,” I turned around and looked down at the little boy who had crept over to my side.  “What happened?”

“My friend threw the football and hit the light and it broke, but she’s going to buy a new one.”

My initial feeling was of relief, thankful it was something that was easily fixed and wasn’t going to take up my entire evening to remedy.  I didn’t say anything more to my son, I know my husband had reminded him more than enough that that is why we don’t play ball in the house.

Sure enough, about an hour later our neighbor knocked on the door with a new glass plate for the light fixture. I screwed it into place, and now the only remaining sign of the incident was the unusually clean house.  But that, too, was already starting to fade!