<p>I’m with rodney. How much time have you got?</p>
<p>When my S was 15, I blocked his access to Facebook & his Xbox at the router because he was abusing both. I also took away his texting privileges when I got a $125 bill for overages.</p>
<p>What he did: he began “poaching” on my neighbor’s unencrypted router signal for the Xbox. He dumped his cellphone and took all the gift cards he had received for his birthday & Christmas, got a friend with a driver’s license to take him to Best Buy & purchased a “pay-go” cellphone (cellphone of choice for drug dealers & terrorists :D). Then he used a proxy server to get on Facebook and post his new cellphone number with the note, “my parents don’t know that I have this cellphone.”</p>
<p>Dumb thing he did: he left himself logged in to FB on the family computer, where I discovered the message with the new phone number.</p>
<p>The other day D called & said she had lost her wallet. We helped her cancel everything, had her file a police report, fraud alert, etc. It was found a few days later, in a friends’ car where she must have dropped it! </p>
<p>S left his wallet & newish Motorola Rizer phone on a bench in the gym when he went to the bathroom. Surprise–someone had stolen it when he was gone! Fortunately for him, he did recover much of the contents he found nearby but had to cancel and alert & file a police report.</p>
<p>Shortly thereafter, S went with relatives to a place that had a climbing wall. You guessed it, he again left his wallet & phone on the bench but fortunately his aunt scooped it up before anyone else decided to!</p>
<p>S also didn’t understand why I was hounding him about the importance of getting his driver’s license over the winter break. I had inquired with the DMV and they would NOT allow him to renew it except 30 days prior to the permit expiring and he HAD to be present. He was NOT planning to be home any time during that window. He saw no problem with trying to use an expired permit as his ID and was shocked when I told him others would not share his view. He was able to pass the day before he flew back to school, on his 3rd roadtest!</p>
<p>I also forced D to get her driver’s license so she would have an ID that would not expire while she was away & unable to renew it. Sheesh! She passed after her 2nd roadtest, in the middle of winter break.</p>
<p>OH yea, H has been rebuilding and replacing window screens with frames recently. He somehow mis-measured the frames for the two front windows so they were about 1/2 to 1/4" too big. S had painted them and they had glued and nailed them on very well. He finally decided to cut pieces out of each frame rather than re-make the frames. It worked well but did take quite a bit of problem-solving on his part. :)</p>
<p>son is a freshmen in college. Let two friends hang from home hang out in his room, have a big ole noisy party complete with booze and pot and left them there while he and his roommate went to a concert. Got put on probation. Now that’s pretty stupid, no?</p>
<p>I lost my favorite sweatshirt for six months when I was a senior in high school. I thought I’d left it on top of a vending machine at the hockey rink. </p>
<p>I found it in my pants drawer. I’d thrown it in there in an attempt to clean laundry off my bed, and after that it took me six months to put pants away where they belong. >.<</p>
<p>I wish I could participate in this thread, but I have to protect the not-so-innocent and too many people know me and my kids at this point. Let’s just say I have y’all beat!</p>
<p>I think it is probably safe to say most parents don’t know about the <em>really</em> dumbest stuff. Not once they are in college, anyway. Heck, since the advent of cell phones, we don’t even know where they are calling from.</p>
<p>Yea, we have frantically searched for things for S & others, only to find it where we first told him to look and he SWORE he had searched the place thoroughly! ARGH!</p>
<p>Dumbest thing I ever did? I was 17 or 18 and sitting on the roof of a friends car in a parking lot. He jokingly decided to start driving (was maybe going 1 mph, the slowest crawl imaginable). I freaked out and thought I was going to fall off and get run over so I decided to jump off the hood. Naturally I forgot that when you are in motion (Ever so slightly) you don’t jump and land in a straight line. I wound up shoulder first into the ground. The whole thing was scuffed open and bleeding. I bandaged it up and it healed but I really coddled it for awhile as it was healing. To this day, it’s the weaker of my two shoulders… It will be sore a day after throwing a football or after two or three games of bowling. I’ve been starting to do some exercises to strengthen it up.</p>
<p>My daughter has never done a single dumb thing in her life, nor have I (Ha) but my friend’s daughter was grounded, including prom night, for misbehavior. She convinced her mom to let her “study” at a friend’s that night, because it was so depressing to be alone. Her mom relented. The next day, daughter is buried in a magazine at the grocery store, and she and her Mom get to the checkstand. The checker says “How was prom? You looked so beautiful last night!” Yup, she 1 - lied about the study date 2 - ordered a boutenierre from the grocery store next to her house 3 - picked it up in her dress
4 - Didn’t pay attention to the checker enough to steer her mom away from her the next day! Funny for the rest of us… not so much for her.</p>
<p>Hang in there parents. My kid that was “absent minded professor” in the early years mature a lot as he went through high school… and now he is an organized (enough) college freshman doing very well.</p>
<p>As he got older there were far fewer sentences now starting with, “Oh mom…”. The preamble was usually enough to start my blood pressure rising. </p>
<p>Both kids have plenty of smart kid / dumb kid stories. Some funny now. Some not.</p>
<p>Son and his smart college-senior friends booked flights to Europe so they could take a 3-week organized tour after graduation. Spent lots of money on an “open jaw” ticket so they could arrive in one country and return from another on the right days, to line up with the tour they planned to take. They booked the flights in November, but didn’t bother to book the actual tour until February. You guessed it - the tour was sold out. They found a different tour, then had to change their flights and pay over $200 in change fees. There was no increase in the actual airfare though, because the flights they ended up with would have been a lot cheaper if they had booked them originally, but the airlines don’t credit you the lower airfare.</p>
<p>Last summer we were at a wedding reception in the swamps of Florida. Literally, the reception was held at an old plantation, 3 miles from the main highway down a single-lane road. The mansion backed onto a river. They had the dance floor set up out back under a huge live oak tree, with spotlights shining into the dance area. Beyond the immediate back yard it was PITCH black. 18 year old D was wearing high-heeled sandals and sitting with us when a young man she had NEVER met asked her to dance. She went to the dance floor with him. A few minutes later I saw them vanish into the dark beyond the spotlight. I sent her father after her. It was a while until they all returned - the boy had asked her if she wanted to go see the dock and she said yes! She had NO idea who he was, and wandered off into the swamp with him in a cocktail dress and high heels! Even if he wasn’t a serial killer, did she THINK about alligators or snakes? </p>
<p>Dumbest thing DH and I did, off the top of my head… we had reservations for a lovely Mothers Day dinner, followed by tickets to see a show, both in a city an hour away. Two blocks from the restaurant I realized: we left the show tickets on H’s dresser. Had to race the hour home, get the tickets, and race the hour back for the show. My Mother’s Day dinner ended up being McDonalds drive-through.</p>
<p>About 4 yrs ago I decided I needed a new bed. I searched everywhere… I think I went to every single mattress store within a half hour of my house. Eventually I gave up because all the ones I liked were crazy expensive (Who ever thought beds would cost a whole paycheck??). </p>
<p>One day, I had off work and I went to the mall in the pouring down rain. I wasn’t there to look at beds but I came across a store having a floor model sale and I saw the most amazing bed for 300 dollars (it was originally 2,000). When it came to check out, they told me they only had free delivery on beds over 500 dollars. If I wanted them to deliver it, it would cost me 75 bucks. I said forget it, for 75 dollars I’ll have my dad come pick it up that evening in the truck. </p>
<p>So naturally after I am done paying and checking out… I call my dad and told him of our plans for the evening. He then points out that a queen sized bed and box spring won’t fit in his truck and reminds me that it’s raining cats and dogs. LOL. Thankfully the place shrink wrapped the bed and box spring in plastic for us. It took us about an hour outside in the rain to tie the bed and box spring down to the truck since they didn’t fit in it’s truck bed and we had to drive them home going about 10 MPH. If looks could kill I would be dead by now. To this day my dad still shakes his head about that day.</p>
<p>I will never live down the day I bought raw packaged frozen meet from a young man who appeared on our doorstep with a sob story. (Don’t worry, lesson learned & I’ll never do it again, but the meat was overpriced --tasted OK.) My kids & relatives are still incredulous that I did it???</p>
<p>My 21 year old recently got two parking tickets on the same day… You guessed it! He got the first one, took it off his car, left his car in the same spot, and got ticketed again. </p>
<p>(I could write a book…I think it’s genetic, my H once accidentally used baby Desitin for toothpaste.)</p>
<p>I have seen people get 4-6 traffic tickets at the same time by the same officer–you think there may have been some personality conflict!!! They have been known to cite the driver for illegal tint ON EVERY WINDOW at up to $150-200/window/citation. They also can cite for expired safety check and expired registration. It really adds up to a tidy sum & often when you meet the driver, you can definitely understand why that person did not get along with the officer!</p>