Quote:
Originally posted by robustpuppy
All my mother had to do was give me a look. It worked through my teen years, and I'm sure it would still work today.
I have taken to practicing this look on my pets. It has no effect on the cat, little effect on the older dog, and devastating effect on the puppy in the basket.
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Mine don't pay attention until I pull out their middle names.
It occurs to me years later that my parents were experts in Good Cop / Bad Cop. They'd switch off in the middle of an interrogation, and they'd constantly keep you off balance.
The most trouble I've ever, ever been in was when my brother (probably 6) and I (probably 7) managed to get a car out of park and into neutral and got it rolling down a driveway that led onto a very busy highway. We did what any normal TV action hero would do in a runaway car: we opened the door and rolled out. My father, who witnessed the whole thing from the window of the store that he was in, was pale and red at the the same time. I think he probably still yells about it in his sleep. We didn't get in trouble for playing with the controls (though we got a separate very long, very tedious, very boring lecture on that). We didn't get in trouble for jumping out of a moving vehicle (again with a separate lecture with more fear of god elements thrown in). We got in trouble for
leaving our sisters in the car. To be fair, the four year old sister was too chicken to jump, and the two year old was still in her car seat and we didn't have time to get her out and also save our own skins. Fortunately, the driveway had a dip at the end, and the car gently rolled into a stop.
I suspect that my dad got a separate fear-of-god inducing lecture on leaving the kids in the car "just for a minute."
