Sharing Parental Experiences

The excerpt below is from a series of reflections from The Lazy HouseHusband Blog

With summer quickly approaching, I mentioned to my wife that it would be great if we had a wooden outdoor table to put on the back verandah. That way, instead of spending the day working indoors on my laptop while Destructo, our youngest son, rips my bedroom office apart (“you just keep working Daddy … I’m playing!”), I could sit out the back with my laptop getting some fresh air and sunshine, looking out for our young son. I pointed out to Corporate Babe that we could also sit outside and have the occasional breakfast together on weekends, and she agreed that it would be a terrific idea.

Anyway, last Sunday we were on our way back home from a family excursion, when Corporate Babe suddenly stopped the car outside a house, a few blocks away from our home. “What’s the matter?” I asked her. She told me she had just spotted a garage sale and maybe we could find a wooden outdoor table there. “No way!” I snapped. “Let’s just go home! Besides, I don’t want to pay for a table. I’m sure we can find an outdoor wooden table for free.”

Sure enough, today as I was driving the kids to school, I drove past a house where someone was throwing out a large, round outdoors wooden table. Where I live, the council holds regular collection days where people throw away oldappliances, furniture, equipment etc., many of them in reasonable condition and some just needing a little repair. I’m not a Mr. Fix-It type of person and I can’t stand clutter, so I generally don’t take notice of these collection days, unless we’re after something in particular, like a chest of drawers for the kids clothes, or an exercise trampoline, and so on.

At first glance, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the table, however, and it looked like just the kind of outdoor table I was searching for. I made a mental note to return there after dropping the kids off at school.

When I drove back, the table was still sitting there. I parked the car in their driveway, opened up the rear door of our people mover and lowered the back seats to make room for the table. I quickly inspected the table and there was absolutely nothing wrong with it, so I cleared the top off some of the things the owners had piled on it and started lifting it towards the back of my car.

Unfortunately, it was too large to fit in. I tried tilting it this way and that way, but the round table top was just too big to fit. What a bummer …

Read the full article here: Tips For Househusbands