Box Spread

Insano kid faces, promising hours of fun.

There is a phenomenon in places children frequent which I think of as Box Spread. I know that sounds dirty (I wish.), but it's actually only messy, and I hate hate hate it. Here is how it goes down:

How it is

1) Child decides to play a game, as children are wont to do.
2) He/she gets the box out and starts hounding parents to play with him. "Mommies! Play with me." etc.
3) Mommy or mommies agree to play because even though we'd both rather have the bubonic goddamn plague than play Chutes and Ladders again, we feel enormous guilt if we don't do it and act like it is THE FUNNEST FUCKING THING WE HAVE EVER DONE IN OUR ENTIRE LIVES. So we swallow our Feelings Of Deep Dread and get into it.

4) Mommy(ies) and child play game, with mommy(ies) working the joy so hard that Ari is like, "Geez, mommies! If I'd known you loved this game so much, I'd have played with you more often!" So now we all feel guilty together, like a family.
5) Game ends, approximately ten hours later, and nobody knows who won, and usually at least one of us is screaming, the other is crying, and the third has (lucky, lucky) fallen asleep.

How it should be

6) Somehow, and this is the important part, in spite of both mommies using every brain cell in a single-minded determination to NOT LET THIS HAPPEN, the box gets strewn about the damn house.

Those of you who are parents know exactly what I mean. How many pieces of a game box are there, people? Two? Ha! Rookies! There are three. The top, the bottom, and the insert. The insert has no purpose other than to create more Box Spread, which is some sort of sick plot Milton Bradley contrived to make us all so miserable we get stupid enough to buy their games. Every child I have ever met is an expert at getting these boxes separated and upside-down on the floor, with not a single piece of the game inside any of the three box parts and the board . . . the board! Is always upside down and bent backwards, usually in the rafters, even though my home has no rafters. This whole spread takes up, somehow, every square inch of the house. In fact it feels like it takes up all the floor space on the planet Earth. Why does this bother me so much? Because I want to live and not crack my freaking head open on the kitchen floor trying to spare a sodding box top. But it is the human instinct to contort oneself into whatever dangerous position one has to to avoid harming cardboard. We all do it. I challenge you to go stomp on some box tops and see how wrong it feels. Make sure you rip the corners! Anyone who can do it without cringing is a sociopath, I tell you.

Certain death.

Sloppy! Won't stay closed!

At 3:00 in the morning when I come to the kitchen for ice cream I slip on the box top and injure myself. This happens about once a week. Oh, and by the way I fuck up the damn box, too. But not so much that we can throw it away. Because then where would we aspire to put all the pieces? I just mess it up enough so that it looks sloppy and won't stay closed and shit. I can get Ari to put things away, but that takes about 12 hours, and I don't feel right cleaning it up for him. Also, of course, there is no point. Because if he sees me touch any of the game pieces or any portion of the box, he will suggest another game. And clearly, neither mommy can handle that. The end.