The girls hate it when Craig leaves the house. Whether he leaves for the seminary, for his teaching job, or for a staff meeting at the church, they just can’t stand it. They usually gang up on him with one girl wrapped around each leg and two girls at each door barring his exit. Today they were in the process of doing just this, only they were concentrating on the back door. Craig told them he was going to go down to the basement to check on something and that he’d come back and fight through their fortress. They were ready.

But when he went downstairs, he sneaked out the basement door and cheerfully waved good-bye to them from the outside of the house. You’d have thought we’d burned all their stuffed animal friends, the wailing that ensued. And the trouble they took to lock the back door extra well was now their barrier keeping them from quickly getting outside to say good-bye to him before he drove away.

They started sobbing.

So I had to then break through their barricade to get outside to stop him from leaving before he pulled out of the driveway. I gave him a look that said he’d better get back in here because I wasn’t about to deal with the havoc of this for the rest of the day all by myself.

He did. He came back in and pulled the two sobbing girls into his lap and tried to explain the concept of a joke. They can dish it well enough, but they have a lot of trouble taking it. Hmm, you can save your commentary on that for another day.

Anyway, the conflict resolved, the girls stopped sobbing, and Craig left for his appointment the normal way – through the front door. But I have a feeling this will be one of those incidents that gets brought up in an office for $75/hour sometime later. Guess we want them to get their money’s worth.