OF COURSE

Last weekend I took my children to my parents’ house for “an overnight,” which always turns into two overnights, because by about 11am the second day I’m too tired to wipe my own snot, much less locate and re-pack seven bags of stuff and 80-something pounds of independently* mobile human.

*understatement that borders on euphemism

The thing about Grandmeg is that she keeps her Very Exciting Snacks, quite like her own mother, in a cupboard low to the ground where even the smallest grandchild can ransack with impunity. This is, of course, the point.

[The biggest prizes in the cupboard, according to two newly-minted four-year-olds, are the graham crackers. If allowed to, they will eat nothing but graham crackers for 48 hours straight. So we have to hide the box at some point, and then they start the graham cracker arias—soulful cries in unrelenting waves, much like what we came to call the “melatonic scale,” that eerie, wobbling, colorful pattern of wailed notes that would issue from the TV room periodically after my husband and I, exhausted and traumatized, had finally thrown up our hands and dosed our feral two-year-olds with melatonin, and run away to hold our breath around the corner while we waited for them to drop.]

By day two, my children had peeled away enough layers of joyful mystery from the snack cupboard for my son to come across what appeared to be a whole-grain oat cracker box somewhere near the back, which, oddly, he decided he’d settle for and immediately made off with—straight down into the basement.

The next thing I heard was him hurrying up the basement stairs, slamming the door shut, and hurrying back down. When this kid hurries, things really start to go like wildfire, so my body got up faster than my brain could really follow, and I Roomba-ed stiffly down the hallway to whip open the door and find out what new disaster had him scuttling and slamming.

What I saw when I opened the door and looked down the stairs was as follows: