Shut the Door!

My son was putting on his shoes before coming to the car this afternoon.   He’d opened the door to the garage and left it open when he realized he didn’t have his shoes on and had to go back to get them.   I yelled to him, “shut the door!” what with it approaching one hundred degrees.

When my son got into the car and we drove off I explained why I was always on the children coming in and out of our house to, “shut the door!”   How right now the house was having a hard time holding temperature on the second floor and the amount of hot air that came in while the door was open added more work for the air conditioning units and costs more energy we were trying to be mindful of.  

I said a lot more by way of explanation but in the end I said to him, “do you know what Gramps always said to me when I was young?   I told him for all my childhood, Gramps would yell out to us, “shut the door!” when we came in or left the house and forgot.   He didn’t like wasting energy either.

Tonight after a dinner with my parents who had been visiting from the mountains, my husband and mother were standing in the doorway and I said to them, “either go in or come out but shut the door, please!”   My husband on one side of the door shut it to a crack and pretended to continue the conversation with my mother who was just outside.    We all started laughing.

It was at that point that I told my father about the conversation I’d had with my son a few hours before on the same subject.   My father said he didn’t remember yelling at me to shut the door and mused that it was interesting how sometimes you don’t remember doing something but the person who it was done to (me being yelled at, for example) remembers it far more vividly.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is in Superhero Parkour camp this week.   When I picked him up I was informed by Zak, the instructor, that my son wasn’t answering to his name anymore, that if I was going to have to call him ‘Black Panther’.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  As my parents were leaving after dinner tonight to head back to the mountains, my mother told my daughter, “next time I’m going to hide you in my car and take you with me.”  My daughter asked with a sense of wonder, “really?”  My mother admitted, “no, you parents wouldn’t let me” to which my daughter quietly said, “well, you could ask?”