What We Do for Our Kids

I had some work to do on one of my kids’ first day home on summer vacation. So, I sent them to the backyard to play, and planned to watch them from the kitchen, where I worked on a laptop computer.

Soon, one of my daughters came inside and asked if she could play with her new boomerang. “Sure,” I told her, adding that she should be careful not to throw the toy over the fence and into the schoolyard behind our house or get it stuck on the roof. Sure enough, not 5 minutes later, my daughter came into the house and said that the boomerang was stuck on the roof. Terrific.

Luckily, the toy wasn’t caught on the very top of the house, but on the roof of our first-floor family room. So the boomerang was only one story up from the ground instead of two. Good.

My daughter raced up the stairs to our master bedroom and looked out the window, from which we could see that the boomerang was caught on the edge of the roof and was resting against the gutter. It shouldn’t be too hard to dislodge the toy, I thought.

I first tried getting a small ladder out from the garage, and while trusting that my daughters would keep it from tipping, climbed up a few steps and tried to push the boomerang off the roof with an old mop I had found. All I accomplished in doing so was pushing rain water off the roof and onto our heads. Fun.

Then I had the great idea to take the garden hose, turn it on to a hard spray and try to spray the toy off the roof. That didn’t work either, but I am sure my neighbors got a kick out of watching me spray our roof while standing on a ladder. Or at least they were wondering what I was up to.

I then retreated to the second-story master bathroom. I rigged up an extension curtain rod by extending it out and taping the two parts together with masking tape so I wouldn’t lose the extension on the roof. I opened the screen to the bathroom window, stuck the extension through, and managed to push the boomerang off the roof, much to my daughter’s glee.

So about an hour later, I had no work done, had one very wet, dirty mop, and needed to give my daughters a bath and take a shower myself to get the dirty rain water (from the roof) off our heads. But at least I rescued the $5 boomerang. I guess that’s the joy of being a parent.