Joe Cianciotto: The Leprechaun Incident
Posted by Joe Cianciotto
So last week was St. Patrick’s Day, landing firmly on a Friday this year. Being on the road Monday through Thursday I was pretty psyched that I’d get to spend that holiday with the little buggers. Until we had kids, I had always associated St. Patty’s with Nassau County vomiting dyed-in-the wool Long Islanders onto an unsuspecting Manhattan and the requisite horror show that ensued on the LIRR commute back home.
See the cool thing about kids is that through their eyes you get a non-cynical somewhat ideological appreciation for anything even remotely representing a holiday. From the Tooth Fairy, to a diaper-swaddled Cupid, to the groundhog’s freaking shadow…it’s game on. And as March 17th approached all the girls could talk about were leprechauns, pots of gold and candy coins.
Anyway, Thursday night as my plane is landing into LaGuardia, there is this cryptic text from Jen asking me not to flush the toilet downstairs or clean up the mess in the kitchen. The bathroom part seems a little bit off-putting, but hey, you don’t have to tell me twice not to clean up the house. So I get home and of course beeline to the toilet, because that’s the weirdest part, and low and behold there’s what looks like pink icing in the toilet. I get the hell out of that freakfest and head into the kitchen where a bunch of Hannah’s toys and a school papers are strewn about the floor. I sit down and fix myself a bowl of Froot Loops, because that’s what grown men do at 12:30 in the morning and then I eventually head upstairs.
I wake Jen up, who in a sleep-like stupor explains to me that she made the mess so the kids would know that the leprechaun came by.
I’m immediately thinking, you gotta’ be kidding me… have we not scarred them enough with that damn elf on the shelf, so now we have them thinking house-wrecking leprechauns are infesting our home? I tell Jen she’s nutty and then fall fast asleep. That is until Hannah comes by and wakes us up at 6 in the morning and heads downstairs with my wife. By the time I make it to the kitchen the crime scene has already been cleaned and Hannah’s putting her coat on to get to the bus stop. To be honest I think I might have been the most unsettled about all of this, so I of course say nothing and off Hannah goes to school.
Come to think of it I don’t think I have spoken to either Hannah or Sophie about that morning. The thing is Jen is such an incredible mother that I would give her a hard time about this whole leprechaun fiasco but given her stellar track record I just kind of feel like she deserves the mulligan.
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