when the force wasn't with Tank

I will be the first to admit it.  Tank is very entertaining.  People gravitate to him like dirty socks to his bedroom floor (technically his dirty socks rarely land on his bedroom floor - therein lies the problem.  He takes his socks off in odd places and never puts them in the dirty laundry.  He ends up rummaging thru Coach's drawers in the morning desperate for socks.  He never has clean socks because they are hiding out all around the house still dirty!). 

He is a character, but Tank's extensive fan club doesn't get what it is like to co-habitate with this kid.  His size 15 shoes can be found ANYWHERE but in his mudroom locker.  His impact on our surroundings involves more than just his inability to put things in the right place.

Tank will eat anything.  He will devour entire packages of something while hanging out in a 'don't-eat-in-here' space in the house.  Then he will leave the container in the non-kitchen room where I stumble upon it much later.  I have to hide certain groceries just so the other kids get a chance to have a nibble.  I bought donut holes last week.  I showed Reg, my early riser, where I was hiding them for breakfast, so he could get them out in the morning.  Had I not taken this step, we would've woken up to yet another 'who-ate-all-the-donut-holes' mystery, which in our house isn't much of a mystery.

This is my new freezer that
 for a few days was
 commissioned to only
hold basketball fundraiser
 pizza boxes.

Remember the fundraiser for basketball that landed over 70 boxes of french bread pizzas in my freezer?  We did our best to deliver the pizzas the first few days after we were saddled with them.  When people weren't home, we stored them in my freezer until they could be handed off to the lucky pizza purchaser.  I told the kids don't eat any of the pizzas until we are done delivering, because lots of these boxes don't belong to us.

I gave Tank his own private lecture about the pizza overflow situation.  'Don't eat the pizzas yet, Tank!  Not all of these are ours.  You have to wait until we are done handing them out.'  His response:  'I know.  I don't even like those pizzas.  They are gross.'

Imagine my surprise one morning a week before Christmas when a wrapper was discovered laying on the kitchen table.  I opened the freezer and sure enough SOMEONE had opened a box of pizza and eaten one of the 6 microwavable portions.

Tank didn't even bother to deny it.  'Sorry,' he winced.  Of course the box he had unceremoniously ripped into was NOT one of the varieties that I had ordered for our family.  Damn it.  How could I hand someone a partially eaten box of pizza.  It was making me flash back to when Mini sold girl scout cookies.  Mayhem.  The boys ate boxes of cookies like it was their sole mission in life.  They ate thru boxes that actual customers had ordered.  People, NOTHING IS SACRED.

Tank's PJ bottoms. 
You could say he is a
Star Wars fan. 
Unfortunately, he is also a
fan of pizza that doesn't belong to him.

He was very excited to attend the latest Star Wars movie later that night.  Final exams were done, and he and Eddie had made plans to go see it. 


I yanked that privilege out from under him.  'Movie you won't be seeing will you, young jedi,'  (That is my best Yoda imitation). 

There were tears.  Rants.  Begging.  Fake phone calls where he pretended that he was arranging for his friend to come and get him so they could see the movie together.  I stuck to my guns.  He even tried to hide out in the car because he knew Ed was about to leave for the movie.  I had to physically detain him so that Eddie could drive away.  Then he attempted to chase the car down the road.

I should've known I was in trouble when he classified the pizza as 'gross.'  In Tank's world gross pizza isn't a thing.