A barrel of monkeys

I was a good child growing up. I rarely caused trouble or made poor decisions. That is, unless my cousin Desirée was around.

There is a wonderful picture of us taken when we were about four. (I'd love to post it here, but unfortunately it is an ocean away, sitting on my mother's piano.) We're posing with our grandmother, grinning mishchievously. Just prior to the moment when that photo was taken, my mother had returned to my grandmother's house after a morning of running errands to find my grandmother exiled to the front porch. We had locked her out of her own home. Naughty little girls!

Another one of the poor decisions we made together was pouring sand into each other's hair. Thankfully, my hair was very short at the time. Desirée's was waist-length, though, and it took my grandmother three tries to wash all the sand out of it.

But our most glaring lack of judgment surfaced one day when we both had to go to the bathroom. Earlier that morning, we had seen a picture of two very young children sitting back-to-back on the toilet. Our seven-year-old selves decided that we should try to recreate that photo and use my grandmother's toilet simultaneously.

Needless to say, it didn't work.

It took a while to clean up the mess.

Oops. (Sorry, Mee-Maw!)