Stealth

The other day I was getting ready to take the boys out, loading up the car and the like, and suddenly I noticed that Daniel was missing, which made me very unhappy. Amy, Ian and I all searched for him, and I started panicking, only to find that a minute later a slow-flying flash of orange jersey flying out the front door. A triumphal and very cheerful Daniel exclaimed, "I was in Mommy's office, hiding in there."

At least as funny as that was Ian's speculation as to where Daniel might be while I was looking for him: "Maybe he's hiding Pepsi."

This is a reference to an ongoing sport the boys enjoy, where they raid my stash of cans of Pepsi, which happens to number in the hundreds (probably about 15 12-packs). They like to take cans - usually toppling over the stack of 12-packs in the shed, prying one open, and then removing the cans one-by-one. The "hiding" kicks in when they spirit the cans away to random caches in the back yard, usually behind the house where I'm unlikely to look.

I don't know why they hide my Pepsi, or why they enjoy the activity so much. It might be like me and my brother and sister when we were small, crumpling up my grandmother's cigarettes and dropping them over the railing of her porch and into the trees below. We knew they were bad for her, so we had no remorse about destroying the offending substance. Amy tells them that Pepsi is unhealthy, and they seem to believe her... Daniel tries to drink it every chance he gets, so I figure at least he must believe it's bad or he probably wouldn't be interested.