When kids sneak the vacuum to their room

It is a well known fact amongst the general adult populous that children HATE cleaning. I can't say I blame them. I myself do not love to clean. I love to sit on my butt watching cooking shows and eating unhealthy food. I clean because I love what clean looks like. So you can imagine my curiosity when on Saturday night Matty stealthily snuck into the living room, slipped the vacuum out of the broom closet and tried to ever so nonchalantly drag it down the hall.

Now, Matty is a sweetheart, and it's not totally unlike him to clean in order to surprise me. But on this particular occasion, he had been playing in his room with his cousins who were over for the evening. I may not be the brightest bulb in the box, but I felt fairly certain that left to their own devices, a group of children ages ranging 3 to 8 would not seek out a vacuum cleaner as a source of rousing entertainment. In short (or not so short) the Smomometer was violently bumped into "Uh Oh" mode.

"This is not good," I say to Andy who is sitting on the nearby couch.

"What's not good?" he asks inquisitively.

"Matty just came out and got the vacuum cleaner and took it back to the room." I explain.

No sooner had I said this when Jake wanders down the hall to where we sit. "Promise you won't get mad?" he says.

"No," Andy replies. "I will promise no such thing."

"Promise, promise you won't get mad?" He asks again, plaintively.

"No," Andy emphasizes once more. "What did they do?" he asks.

"Well you know Matty's Spiderman toy? They sprayed it all over the walls in the room."

Now this Spiderman toy, I am sure, was meant to spray out something like silly string to mimic spraying out a web. Problem is, what comes out the end of the cans is nothing like silly string. It's like wet blobs of colored magnetic snot that leave gray trails of slug slime where'ere they land.

Sufficiently alarmed, Andy and I wander down to the boys' room, where we find four little bodies scurrying about feverishly in an attempt to gather up lumps of sticky web goo. Interrupted in their frantic cleaning, four little sets of eyes note our presence with horror.

"Who did it?" we ask in stereo.

"We were trying to get it up onto the shelf," testifies spokesperson Matty, "and it sprayed all over."

"Did you spray it on the walls?" I ask.

"Andrea did," Matty reports, pointing to the three year old in the corner, "I was trying to get it back on the shelf."

"So you didn't spray any of it?" I ask.

"I was trying to clean it up," he explains, deftly avoiding my question.

With corporal punishment looming, all the culprits admit they might have sprayed a little.

Things like this just crack me up. Kids are such fantastically complex and calculating creatures. They somehow become so much craftier when they know they have done something wrong. I suppose adults are no different really. I know my eyes get alot shiftier before I sneak a cookie or run a red light. Not that I do that kind of stuff. Ahem. Hem. Cough.

Cyndi