DAD'S PHILOSOPHY: DON'T GET MAD, GET EVEN

My father has always been a vault of riotous entertainment. His forte is teasing and practical jokes. If ever you were to visit him at work, it would be wise to not eat anything out of the cookie or candy jar on his desk. Also, question everything he tells you.

Perhaps the worst of these practical jokes happened to me when I was 18 and working in a day care center...

(This is where those wavy, magical memory lines would normally appear on your TV screen, accompanied by tinkly music, and I can't help but imagine them here.)

I worked in a two-room day care center for about a year right after high school. The two rooms were divided by age; preschool in one room and school age kids in the other. Each room had a bathroom and a little kitchenette for breakfast and snack preparation.

When I was first hired, my position was that of a teacher's assistant, which meant that I did everything the preschool teacher did with the exception of planning activities to teach the kids about colors, numbers, how to wipe themselves, etc. About three months after I started work there, the preschool teacher quit for some unmemorable reason, and the center's director took a six month maternity leave at exactly the same time. The result was that I was the only adult left in the preschool room for a good portion of the day. Aside from being illegal, the situation was very stressful and overwhelming. Most days there were 20 kids between two and a half years and five years attacking me from every side. After the older kids went off to school, Brad, the school-age teacher would come and lend a hand, and that was a relief. Hooo! Just the thought of it is giving me panic attacks.

Well, one afternoon, things were particularly crazy. The older kids had returned to the center after school and I had lost my help. Running from the puzzle table to the sensory table to the blocks station while attempting to sanitize the nap mats and clean up the snack tables was making my head spin. The noise of those 20 toddlers was rising like the pressure inside a fat man's gastric abyss after an all-you-can-eat Mexican lunch. In the midst of all this chaos, Brad comes in from the other room, holding the hand of one seven-year-old named Josh. Poor Josh was learning to live with autism and would sometimes become agitated in the school-age room. Bringing him into the preschool room where he could be left alone to peruse the bookshelf usually calmed him down. So in he came and laid down on the floor in front of the books and began to devour them.

And then the phone rang.

I frantically answered it, hoping it would be a wrong number so I could get back to disaster management.

"Children Northwest, can I help you?"

"Where's my dad?", came the reply from a timid sounding little boy.

"Who is your dad, Honey?", I asked.

"Where's my dad?" and the little voice was beginning to whimper. But it wasn't just a timid voice, this was the voice of a mentally handicapped little boy looking for his Dad. Why would the mentally handicapped boy call the day care looking for his dad? And then I wondered if Brad had a child we didn't know about, because, you know - it wouldn't have been a stretch and it would have made a lot of things clear. Okay, so a handicapped boy needs help. The nap mats can wait.

"What is your dad's name?", I asked.

"Dad!" he cried.

And then I did a scan of the room to make sure nobody was taking advantage of my distraction. Wouldn't you know? Josh was still laying on his stomach perusing the pages of Clifford The Big Red Dog, but he had his hand down the back of his pants and he was picking something out and flicking it across the room.

Did you know that your brain can scream without any noise coming out of your mouth? It can.

Josh was flicking poop across the room and I was stuck on a corded phone, just out of reach of his small sneakers, talking to a mentally disabled boy who needed his father! I didn't know what to do! I could ask the disabled boy to hold on, but he was already so confused and upset, I didn't know if he would hang up and be in danger, or if he would start to cry and become unintelligible, or something worse. So I had to keep the boy talking. So what about Josh, who was still engrossed in his book and still digging for things to fling? I inched toward him as far as I could while still listening to my distraught caller.

"Do you know where your mom is?", I asked.

"Where's my Dad?" came the frightened reply. Shoot! What to do? Still more feces flying to who knows where? I was really, really hoping that none of the preschoolers in the dress up area were getting hit with the contents of Josh's pants.

I stuck out my foot, trying to tap Josh's shoe and alert him to what he was doing while lost in his book. No luck, couldn't reach him.

"Tell me your Dad's name, Honey," I said.

And then the breathless snickering from the other end of the phone line.

I froze and listened to the familiar chuckle of my father as he enjoyed the brilliance of his little joke.

I made the mistake of telling my father that I had an autistic boy here who was flinging poop across the room while I tried to help find the disabled boy's dad, thankyouverymuch, which then made the joke even more hysterical to my father, who I had to hang up on and call back later. There were lots of poo balls to find...

My dad is pretty funny, but his timing is atrocious.