Velcro and Bungee Ropes

My boys’ favourite hobby?  You might be thinking football, playing on their DSs, riding their bikes or playing with their willies.  All wrong.  My boys’ favourite hobby is running.  Sometimes outside but mainly in the house.  Just running.  Aimless, futile, endless running, up and down, from the settees in the conservatory to the settees in the living room to then hurtle themselves onto the sofa from a distance.  And then they start again.  Sounds fun, doesn’t it?

Not fun.  Not when you’ve balanced a pile of clean clothes on the back of the settee ready to take upstairs and put away, only to have it topple over and get creased.  Not fun when you’re trying to have five minutes to yourself and the next thing you know a small person is throwing himself at you and elbows and knees are attacking various soft and vulnerable parts of your anatomy.  And not fun when you’ve gone back to bed for an hour on a Sunday morning (having been up with the kids since just after six) and all you can hear is fairy elephant feet stomping through the house, usually accompanied by hysterical screaming (sometimes the boys’, sometimes my husband’s).

So I’m going to put ‘deterrents’ in place to discourage this harmless but irritating behaviour.  I’m thinking patches of velcro on the starting settee so they just can’t get up in the first place; or maybe short bungee ropes that will just ‘ping’ them back before they cross the threshold of the living room.  Or I might slyly tie their ankles together when they’re sitting together watching television; wouldn’t be able to run as fast then, would they?

Maybe I could get away with just putting a bowl of warm, soapy water on the sofa; they wouldn’t want to risk getting THAT on themselves, would they? (Well, they are boys after all).

But the best solution I’ve come up with is to pay a glazier to come during the night and quietly put a door back up between the rooms…a clear, one piece glass door (made of safety glass of course – I’m not COMPLETELY irresponsible) but with no warning stickers.

It would be a triple blessing; it would stop the running, act as sound proofing and my husband and I could have some laughs watching them bounce off it before they realise what we’ve done 🙂