Often I wonder how people manage to get through each day in their lives without the help of medication. It seems like most people have no idea of common sense and logic. My seventeen year old daughter for example is a prime example of this phenomenon. The husband and I took the kids away for a nice family vacation together, but being at a difficult age, my daughter thought it would be boring and insisted on staying at home. She put forward a strong case for not coming along to the family holiday by saying she had far too much homework to do for her makeup course in Melbourne. It was a solid argument and one that I couldn’t help but agree with. She had worked so hard to get into the course and it was great to see she was taking her studies seriously. My wife was very proud of her little girl for following her dreams and enrolling in a makeup artist course. I think she was excited to have a beauty therapist in the family, she loves all that kind of stuff. The beauty course was even covered by hecs support, of course we were more than happy to support our daughter in any way we can.
When we got back from the family holiday we discovered to our horror that our daughter had fallen asleep with the deep fryer on. She’d been up the really late the night before finishing an assignment for her beauty course and had crashed out. Luckily she woke up to the sound of the fire alarm and a guy next door had called the fire brigade. I was relieved that nobody was hurt but furious at the kid for being so irresponsible. The fire was localised to the kitchen thankfully and there appeared to be minimal damage. The fire damage revealed part of the roof which appeared to have signs of termite activity. It was lucky that the fire happened in the end because as it turns out there was a large termite problem we didn’t know about. I wanted to get the termite Inspectors from Mornington to have a good look through the place just in case. They quickly confirmed my suspicions, we did indeed have a big termite problem. My daughter thought the whole thing was pretty funny, the smile faded when I grounded her for three weeks. No matter how hard you try as a parent sometimes children just need time to grow up and stop making bad decisions. I’m not angry that she almost burned the house down, I’m upset that she almost got herself killed. Try explaining that to a teenagers without getting an eye roll.
I explained to the man from pest inspections company in Melbourne what we had found as I walked him through the house towards the kitchen. He assured me that it would be a problem to carry out the termite treatment, Mornington has quite the termite problem it seems and thankfully we found the problem early. A few weeks after the termites had been sorted out I jokingly asked my daughter if he could turn the deep fryer on and cook up some chips for dinner. The house fell silent. Too soon for jokes?