Taking Churros From Children

Don't do it.

So, I'm cleaning up a little at our fantastic, unbelievable, infinity pool to the ends of the earth Southern California vacation house and I see a churro left over from a pit stop earlier that day.


Certainly everyone has already eaten their churro who wants one.   I say to myself as I pop it in my mouth and finish wiping down the kitchen table (which the house rules say we are not to stand on as it may break - we are not really the dance on the kitchen table kind of vacationers, but you never can tell, right?)

Just as I'm wiping the cinnamony goodness from the corners of my mouth my wee nephew, part 8 year old, part ocean liner, walks into the room looking for the last churro that has been lovingly saved for him.  "Do you know where my churro is?" He asks in a panic, eyes round as frisbees.  

I can't remember the last time I felt this ashamed, so I hemmed and hawed until he left the room looking for it elsewhere.  When I didn't see him for a while I thought I'd gotten away with only the intense personal shame of stealing treats from a child instead of the public humiliation I deserved, but then he trudged up the stairs with the most enormous alligator tears I've ever seen running down his round face.

"They saved one churro for me and some idiot walked by and ate it!"

He sobbed at me, looking for answers.  You know why? Because adults have answers.  They help kids find lost things, they sympathize when idiots walk by and eat your churro...they don't eat your churro and then hide it from you.

For some reason I felt like my first step was to confess to his parents and they, of course, laughed, because it's kind of funny and they are nice people.  But I made Max drive me 20 minutes to the nearest town to buy him another one.  It was only after we left the gated community that we realized we didn't know the code to get back in and that we'd left our cell phones back at the house.  In the end we found a solution that didn't include scaling the gate and running up the hill to our vacation home AND the churro was delivered without me having to forever break the trust of my churro loving nephew.

Churro-gate aside, vacations are awesome.  So awesome, in fact, that I'm just getting around to blogging on the next to last day of ours.  Our R&R has been so terrific.  We got to see lots of friends and family, we ate American food that was bad for us but tasted amazing, we went to Disneyland, and Max's high school band got back together for one giant concert in the park where we rocked until the sun went down (and the sprinklers turned on and almost ruined our equipment...)  I'll blog more about getting to know America again, but right now Max's brother's are building a  human train down the waterside with the lights off and it's pitch black.  How could I miss that?