You're Excused

Gone are the days of “my dog ate my homework” and other lame excuses. As a mother with young children, I find that my excuses in everyday situations are thoroughly believable because they are way too far-fetched to have been made up:

“I’m sorry we can’t return the Transformer toy that you let us borrow yesterday. Spiderman apparently trapped him in a web (the chain that opens and closes our radiator vent) and there’s no way to untangle him. As soon as we can get our hands on a pair of wire cutters, we’ll return Optimus Prime.”

“I’m sorry I don’t have dressing to go with the salad I brought. I forgot that my kids had reappropriated this cruet as a jar for collecting nature specimens. I brought it, thinking it contained homemade Italian dressing, but now I see that it’s filled with pond water, gravel and drowned ants.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t answer or return your phone calls yesterday. My toddler changed the ringer to “silent”, set the phone’s alarm clock, and then hid the phone (after downloading $19 worth of new ringtones). We finally found it in the oven at 3:28am when the alarm went off.”

“I’m sorry I was in the bathroom for the first 10 minutes after your family arrived for dinner (after you drove two hours to get here). I dashed in to comb my hair as you knocked, but the comb got stuck in some syrup that I guess my daughter massaged in my head at breakfast. It took me a while to find the eyebrow scissors in the bathroom and cut the comb out of my hair.”

“I’m sorry we’re late. I allotted 45 minutes to get three children dressed and out the door, but (fill in the blank with endless possibilities; here are a couple):

(a) Everyone was dressed, jacketed, and ready to go on time, and I was helping my three year old learn to zip his own jacket. In the blink of an eye, my toddler disappeared into the bathroom, took her hairbow out, and flushed it down the toilet. Cleaning up the overflow set us back a few.

(b) It wasn’t the digging the car out of twenty-something inches of snow that delayed us. Actually, my four year old daughter stepped into a mound of loose ice and cracked her Cinderella dress-up heels into several pieces. She made a valiant attempt to offer up the cold and the humiliating wardrobe malfunction for the needs of poor children, but a mile down the road her sweet sobs from the backseat compelled me to turn the car around and go home for her backup pair of Sleeping Beauty heels and dry socks.”