Yeah, I know Halloween's over, but I gotta say this

I know one thing my older boys did not do this Halloween: roll anyone’s yard.
Come to find out that there’s been a whole lotta nighttime pranking in my neighborhood lately. Most of it has NOT been as good-natured as the two times my own kids rolled someone, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.
Ever since I joked about our buying TP for my kids and a couple of their friends so they could roll another kid’s yard during a recent sleepover, I’ve gotten e-mails and Facebook messages detailing all manner of midnight vandalism.
Of course, everyone now assumes my kids did it all.
So I’ll just set their records straight. They rolled two friends. The friends know who they are. They did not touch anyone’s house or doorbell. They did not spread anything on the windows of anyone’s house. They did not touch anyone’s vehicle or patio furniture.
The only product my kids threw on anyone else’s property was toilet tissue, Publix brand two-ply. No eggs, no paint, no pickle relish. (I know, sick, right?)
They didn’t even fork anybody.
Needless to say, our family won’t be chuckling about our faux delinquents around the dinner table anymore, since my flip remarks probably made most of the people who live in my neighborhood assume my kids are straight outta juvie.
And why wouldn't they? After all, some idiot wrote about it in the (online) newspaper!
Many parents, however, have whispered to me tales of their own kids' failed attempts at neighborhood naughtiness and lessons learned the hard way.
For example, nothing ruins a fun night of TP-ing faster than dropping your cell phone in the bushes.
I also learned (second-hand) that if you plan a night of juvenile jocularity, your getaway vehicle should not have a loud, distinctive muffler that your neighbors hear regularly as you drive out of the subdivision on school mornings.
In fact, the closest thing my older kids came to committing a crime on Halloween is the fact that they are six feet tall and they still went trick-or-treating. Some towns have age limits on that.
They did make an attempt to go out in “costume,” but at age 14 Halloween’s not about dressing up anymore. It’s about getting candy. A LOT of candy.
I think next year we’ll encourage them to hang around here, maybe pull the old “live scarecrow on the porch” trick and leave the midnight TP runs to some other unsuspecting parents.
It just goes to show that one kid’s hilarious joke is another mom’s home maintenance nightmare.

Incriminating receipt tracks hubby's whereabouts

I found something shocking in my husband’s pants pocket last week as I sorted our various whites, darks and in-betweens.

I have to check pants pockets when I do laundry because Tim is famous for scribbling “important” phone numbers on Post-It notes and filing them in his pockets. Most of the time, I find only work-related gibberish like the number 42, the word “rivet” and an arrow for emphasis.

This most recent search, however, yielded something different: an incriminating receipt.

From the time stamp, I could see that my husband had made a late-night trip to Publix. The itemized list made me pause: He’d bought a pack of gum, a 20-oz. Diet Coke and three 24-packs of toilet paper.

This, combined with our 14-year-olds’ recent string of sleepovers here, only pointed to one conclusion. My husband was helping turn our sons into suburban outlaws.

Yep, he’d actually driven them and three friends to our neighborhood Publix to buy toilet paper so they could meet some other neighborhood friends and roll the yard of the unfortunate friend who couldn’t come that night.

I’m sure they didn’t look suspicious at all; a bunch of giggling 14-year-old boys elbowing each other as my husband tried to decide if want wants his TP haul bagged in paper or plastic.

Apparently getting your yard rolled, or “TP’d,” as some may call it, is like a tip of the hat. It’s a sign of affection, if you will, not an insulting act of vandalism the way I thought of it growing up.

The first time my boys rolled someone’s yard, they were invited to go by a friend of theirs who had another friend sleeping over. No kid comes up with this idea alone, apparently. If yours does, you may want to make sure he isn’t turning into some modern-day Boo Radley.

Still, my neighbors and I all consider ourselves to be conscientious parents. Not wanting them to walk the streets in the middle of the night, her parents drove them to the intended victim’s house. Then her dad had to remind them to at least try to be discreet about sneaking up to roll someone’s yard. Not exactly hardcore rebels, they were sashaying up the front walk like they were calling on Sunday.

This particular house only had one new sapling and a huge euonymus bush in the front yard, so they wrapped about a dozen rolls around those two plants and then scampered back into the truck to try another house.

I don’t mind their rolling their friends’ yards because they usually go by the next day to help clean up. They never use anything permanently damaging, like eggs, or anything super messy like the melted Pudding Pops someone left in my mailbox once in seventh grade.

I suspect it’s much more of a social activity for them, since most of the TP is only half-heartedly tossed about eight feet in the air.

Back in my day, I knew a few boys who could throw so high they’d make you regret for three weeks that our society doesn’t still use a Sears catalog in the bathroom.

I guess I should be glad they’re participating in a physical activity outside rather than playing Xbox all night, right?

Maybe not, but there are worse things they could be doing. And worse things I could find in my husband’s pocket.