In the nearly ten years we've lived here, we've really not had so much as a threat of a break-in, but if ever Ben feels that some risk is presenting itself, he leaps into action.
Like the time he followed a car from our neighborhood to the 'bad' side of town, and wrote down their license plate number and the street address of the house they pulled into; all because they were driving slow by our house a couple times so Ben was convinced they were casing the joint. Turns out they were actually just visiting some neighbors.
Or the time we got egged by some high school students, and Ben tracked the egg purchase to the Meijer by our house, on account of the empty Meijer-brand egg carton he found discarded on the side of the road; then somehow convinced a Meijer manager to review surveillance video of the store where she was able to pinpoint a large egg purchase from a U-Scan machine, and she actually gave to Ben a printed still-shot from the video of the four culprits purchasing the eggs.
Ben is a little zealous when it comes to righting injustice.
However....and I don't want to give anyone any ideas here....I'm a little afraid that the only thing a would-be burglar would need to have in his arsenal in order to disarm my vigilante husband....
....is a dirty diaper.
There's not much that can stop this man dead in his tracks and render him essentially useless. A soiled diaper is one of those things.
We've made many a joke about it; and I often use it to my full advantage (I'll change Sophie's diaper if you fix dinner and clean the bathroom and go grocery shopping and put the kids to bed and pour me a glass of wine and take the dog for a walk and switch the laundry over and mow the lawn. Deal?)
He'll do just about anything to avoid the prospect of encountering a dirty diaper.
Every once in a while, after, oh I don't know, six and a half years of me changing all the diapers in this house, I will get annoyed and tell Ben I don't care how hard it is for him, he is going to have to suck it up and DEAL with it because it is his duty as a father, and then I load Travis up for tae kwon do and walk out the door and say Sophie better have a fresh bottom by the time I get back.
And then he calls me from home while I'm sitting at tae kwon do practice and tells me that he threw up while trying to deal with it and he tried to catch most of it in a plastic bag but then he just threw some paper towels on top of it and that's what is waiting for me when I get home.
So my choice is to either deal with all the dirty diapers, or deal with both the dirty diaper AND the fallout from trying to get Ben to do it.
I try to be sympathetic about it most of the time. I'm actually able to muster up any sympathy about 40 percent of the time.
I used to think Ben had a stomach of steel; because back in his prime he could eat or drink anything. Now I think his stomach could be more accurately described as..... pineapple jello. It's wiggly and slimy and slippery and just plain gross.
We are nearing the end of diaper days, as I am now working on potty-training Sophie.
Hmmm. I'm going to have to come up with something else to hang over Ben's head to trick him into doing all those chores.
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