Slinkies and Straw Wrappers

So there are two things I hate about my kids' childhood. Or at least just two things I am prepared to discuss in this post. Stick with me here...this is not one of those deeply heartfelt posts about how I hate the fact I cannot spend nearly enough time with my wittle pwecious babies and am missing so much! Nope, nothing sweet like that! This post is about Slinkies and straw wrappers! See! So much more fun to read about than my deep and abiding love for my children and how I cannot fathom a life without them. Because even though I am technically a "mommy blogger" I am not THAT type of mommy blogger (or really even much of a blogger at all).

First off, the Slinky. Hate them, have never understood them and still don't get how someone, somewhere, got this hoax of a "toy" produced...and it is still produced!! They somehow appear in our house. I don't know from whence they come, but good golly do they ever come. They come in all colors and sizes, too... rainbow slinkies, traditional silver slinkies, slinkies that can fit around your wrist, slinkies that can fit around your finger. WHY? I don't get it. I have never once been able to get a slinky to go down more than one stair step. Were the stairs much shallower when this sucker was invented? I cannot get the slinky to "walk" using its own momentum or whatever the heck it is supposed to do. So, they show up here in the house, unbidden, only to become immediately tangled. Then I have an upset child who, from some reason, thinks this toy is the be all and end all of all toys they have. I THEN have to devote the next twenty minutes trying to unravel the stupid thing. They are never the same after unraveling. They always have some weird bend or kink left in them. But really, what does it matter, they never worked to begin with.


Second bane of my existence: juice pouch or drink box straw wrappers. Hate them with a passion and if they weren't so darn convenient for outings and barbecues they would be banned from our house entirely. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't hate them for the purpose they were invented (unlike the Slinky), covering the straw. I just hate what they become...useless, almost invisible but not quite, trash that ends
up with a weird stickiness and you find in the oddest places. I think they have some force field built in that makes them polar opposite magnets to trash cans. They just never seem to make it in the trash. I have found these things everywhere. And best off all, they end up in two pieces! So you have double the straw wrappers than you have drinks. More fun for your money! I guess it is their near invisibility that makes it just so dang hard for my kids to get these wrappers within five feet of a trash can. Or it's their total disregard for who has to clean up after them. I bet they don't bio-degrade for a gazillion years and generations from now when Wall-E comes to earth to clean it up because we ruined it, he will have the stupid straw wrappers stuck to his robot treads and get all gooped up in there and he will shut down and die a sad robot death...all because my kids had a juice box.