Lawyer Up

Remember my ode to neighbor Paul a few weeks ago? One of the things I love about him is his utter okay-ness with my son and his son destroying his lawn with sports. Over the summer, they carved out a baseball diamond in his poor grass. Rather than punish them (like I would), Paul nailed up a Wrigley Field “Watch for foul balls” sign on his garage.

But as the air crisps and the leaves change, the boys have switched their attention to football. The sport of kings? Sure. I discovered this by way of the makeshift goal posts clamped to our fence, constructed from PVC pipe.

Luca is now in 100% football mode, or as the early 2000’s would say, Beast Mode. He even joined his school’s flag football team (more on that in a later post). And with this change, his video game tastes have changed.

Over dinner with the cousins a few Saturdays ago, Luca broached the subject of buying the newest Madden Xbox game. He was a little gun shy, because all Xbox games are obscenely expensive and he was entering the time of the year when “Your birthday is coming” is the way I, uh, punt those conversations away.

Luca asked if we could come to a deal to get the game early. Little did he know, I was enjoying a tasty bourbon and was lubricated enough to buy him anything.

I offered the game in exchange for picking up Grover’s poop for the rest of the year. Luca began crying because he felt he was being dealt a bad deal.

“No no no, you don’t understand. That was my opening offer. Now we negotiate. You and I go back and forth until we have a deal.”

Luca wasn’t quite sure what to do, so cousin Finn offered to act as his proxy. Finn was a tough negotiator because the idea of picking up dog poop sickened him on every level.

Elijah stepped in for me. I was happy because Eli once negotiated me into buying him 4 pounds of candy from Amazon.com.

The kids went ‘round and ‘round, eventually landing on poop clean-up for the next eight weeks, with harsh penalties for skipping doodie duties. I wasn’t really paying attention, as I was deep in my own negotiations with my brother over whether a second bourbon was a terrible idea or an awful idea.

Deal done, we went home and bought the game. Eli did us the favor of writing up a completely un-legal document. If you look closely, you’ll see Luca purposely misspelled his name in case we have to go to court.