As I do the massive mountain of laundry that accumulates throughout the week I notice that a lot of the pants that my kids own have no or very shallow pockets. I was thinking about how nice it is to not need pockets and the many things that I need to carry around each day. Every day I need my wallet, for money for the food substances that I have to continually acquire from various grocery stores. Most of our funds come from the grocery store where I work and it seems that most of our funds go back into the grocery store to feed these incredibly fast growing monsters. When I was a kid I had little to no knowledge of where my food came from. It appeared every evening around when Dan Rather was blabbering about current events and it magically showed up in my lunchbox at school. Our kids are no different in that they have no appreciation for how much food costs, how it gets here, or how long it takes to prepare it. No amount of pleading or explaining about the starving kids in Africa can make them appreciate their food.
Another item in my pockets are the keys to my minivan. We just bought a new minivan and as uncool as it may be there’s no denying the massive amount of cup holders that thing has. Car payments are the worst and after several hundred years of car payments we finally were free of them. And then the van started breaking down a time or two, leaving us relying of the kindness of family to help us by letting us borrow their vehicle for a month or more while they figured out what was wrong with the van. It was only the engine, no big deal. So instead of being stranded far from home or when we would not be able to borrow a vehicle we decided to replace our old minivan with a brand new shiny one, filled with the new car smell and the promise to take care of this one, though that promise will probably not last. Along with the shiny new van comes shiny new care payments that will plague us well into the next president‘s term and probable impeachment trial.
Kids don‘t have to worry about the vehicles. They don’t mind how new or old and crusty the vehicle has become or the piles of lost snacks that gather in the nether regions of the car. They only care that they need to get in it and it takes them to school, church, or the park.
The last thing that I keep in my pocket is my phone. Now I will admit that my phone is 80% distraction and 20% usefulness, but like my wallet, I need to have it on me at all times. It is the device that the school communicates with us, mainly of pictures or fundraisers but sometimes important things. It is the device where work will contact me on a daily basis to ask me questions that they should already know the answers too. It is the device where Kara can contact me that I need to bring something home from work, such as food because the kids have consumed everything in the house and there is nothing to eat for lunch. It is the device that keeps all of the pictures that we have taken over the years that we sometimes flip through to remind ourselves how fast these little monsters grow. One day they too will have massive amounts of responsibilities and need to budget for their food, be weighed down by car payments, and burdened by people and their jobs needing to contact them. For now though, their pockets remain empty and their cares are free.