MyThreeDaughters

I got home and they were outside. Fontaine pushed through the front door ahead of me.
“Wow, I’m glad this day is over,” she said. “Now, I can finally take this thing off.”
She pulled her right arm toward her and ducked out of the arm sling. She’d had the day off school, and for some reason decided it would be cool to appear to have a broken arm. So she took the canopy fabric off a baby doll stroller and used it for an arm sling.
Earlier that day, Wife had apparently attempted the old reverse psychology trick, like when Grandpa Walton caught Jim Bob smoking a cigarette and made him smoke a whole pack until he got sick. Wife told Fontaine that if she found the arm sling to be so desirable, perhaps she should wear it for her entire day off school.
Fontaine, sharing the stubborn redhead trait with Wife (yeah, this isn’t good, but Wife never reads the site anyway), decided to do just that. So for a full kid work shift, Fontaine kept it on. Fumbled through lunch, rode her scooter one-handed, discovered she couldn’t climb trees past the first limb. Lord knows how the whole bathroom use thing went down.
“I couldn’t do anything,” she said. “We went to two playgrounds, and I couldn’t even do the monkey bars.”
She had, by her own account, a pretty lousy day off from school. All from a self-inflicted fake injury.
Lesson learned? Doubtful. Maybe Wife should have made her wear the sling – and use her one good arm to smoke a whole pack of cigarettes.