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Wednesday, January 27, 2010  

House Rules

At different times, we've had a lot of our friends living in our house with us. It happens when you have a spare bedroom and friends with living situations in flux who you love having around. As we tell all of our long-term houseguests, we only have three rules:

1. If you have a party, invite us.
2. If you let one or more of the cats escape, you're not coming home until you find them.
3. No crashing your car into the garage.

Rule three was the only one of those rules that was ever broken at all, which is why we ended up making it. And it was only broken one other time after that.

As we eventually learned, those are the only stated rules. There are of course lots of unstated rules, but we always left them unstated because we knew we could rely on our friends' common courtesy and common sense to know how to behave.

Of course, this only works with adults. We quickly learned that it doesn't apply when a new roommate moves in at the age of 18 days. One finds oneself stating a lot of new rules in this situation. Some of these rules include:

1. No storing bacon under the coffee table. It goes in the refrigerator.
2. No eating crackers in our bed. Eat whatever you want in your bed.
3. No climbing on the back of the sofa. This is a fairly recent rule, now that we have a new sofa. M. Edium misses our old sofa.
4. No rubbing your bits on the bathroom wall after you pee. Our friend Chao claims to have been heartbroken when we implemented this rule.
5. You've had enough screen time today. HA HA HA HA HA!!!
6. Do not abuse the phrases "shut up," "stupid," or "God." Along with the previous one, this would have gotten me fired from TWoP long ago if I held myself to it.
7. No being naked outside. Especially this time of year.
8. I can't understand you when you whine like that. Previously, this rule applied only to the cats. When they spoke normally we could understand them perfectly.
9. Hold my hand when we cross the street or the parking lot. Some of our roommates might have gotten the wrong idea if I'd insisted on that one.
10. I am in charge. Sometimes M. Edium has a tragic misapprehension of the chain of command around here. He actually tries to claim he's the boss of us. I mean, he is, but we can't let him know that.

And on and on it goes. Sometimes we lament the fact that our three simple rules have been supplanted by what would be a massive tome if we ever printed them all out. But then, I guess it's worth it so we can have a civilized, generally well-behaved boy rather than a filthy, naked, screaming ape-child out of a T. Coraghessan Boyle story. Every once in a while, he needs to be reminded, and more rarely, we'll implement a new rule as needed, like "No more diving off the top bunk."

When he crashes into the garage, though, there's going to be hell to pay.

posted by M. Giant 5:56 AM 1 comments

1 Comments:

We always liked our rules, which apply to visitors as well as anyone who lives with us for any period of time:

-Follow the condo rules
-No throwing people off the balcony
-No dying in the apartment

Even now that we live in a house that's not a condo many of the rules look pretty similar.

By Anonymous Mary @ Parenthood, at February 5, 2010 at 8:17 PM  

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