Love and logic-ish

Oh boy. Where to begin? 


We were going to go swimming today. Our community center has an indoor pool that is sometimes  actually open. 


I was getting everything ready to go but when I walked into the garage, my bike had been moved. Now, moving my bike wasn't a huge deal, but the kids had put it in the way of where R usually parks. 


I was a bit irritated that they had been messing with my bike, but I decided to move it out of the way and talk to them about it later. 


Only...


When I went to move the bike, it no longer rolled easily. 


Are you kidding me? We just had the bikes checked out and 'tuned up' not even a month ago. 


So I'm looking at the bike and I realize the brakes are all funky. How in the world did that happen?


I walk back into the house and T is coming down the stairs. 


I asked him what happened to my bike. And that starts a whole....hoopla...that I seriously don't even have the energy to try and transcribe. 


To try and sum it up it went a little like this: I got about six different stories about what happened - way more if you count each "I don't know" as a separate story. 


The bottom line turned out to be that they were goofing around with the bike, twisted the handle bars around which messed up the front wheel brake grips and at some point it fell over (or T might have tried to stand it up on the handle bars and seat to make the wheels spin fast) which knocked the front brakes all cock-eyed.


When we got enough of the pieces of the story out of the T (S was no help at all) to piece together what happened, we had to figure out how to handle it. 


This is what we decided a la love and logic - we mostly got the bike fixed ourselves, but took it to the bike store and asked the kids go in with it, tell the employee what happened, and ask for an estimate for making sure it was fixed correctly. 


The guys at the bike store took pity on our sad, weepy kids and fixed it for free, which was basically just untwisting the front tire and adjusting the brakes. 


The second part, the trickier part if you ask me, lies with R and I on figuring out what the consequences are going to be for lying. I know the kids didn't mess up the bike intentionally. That part of the issue was solved for me by the kids having to take the bike in for repair. And pay for the gas to take the bike in since the repair ended up being free.


I'm very concerned that it took so long to get most of the true story out and that S was totally going to let T take the fall without a second thought.  Oy! We told the kids we'd think about it, decide on the consequences, and let them know at dinner tomorrow night. 


Sigh. Being a parent is hard work.