And now down to business.
When I was small, a prep or perhaps it began when I was even younger, my brother and I like to be 'mischievous' and sneak out at night. We'd been sent to bed, as you are when you are small. So we would 'spy crawl' down to un-neccassarily long hallway (ducking through sliding door and checking if the coast was clear) now the real problem (as my sister and I would discover countless times years later) is that in order to get to the kitchen (our destination) the door to the lounge must be open. If it is closed you clearly have to open it. Which makes noise, too much noise. Of course noise doesn't matter if the parentals are asleep.
But they weren't. In fact, on most of our 'missions' our parents always seemed to be awake. I think it increased the risk factor and made it way more fun. This particular time Mum and Dad were watching a movie, the door was slightly open, each 10 seconds we'd more the door a centimeter wider, untill we could slip through. I'm pretty sure the movie was titanic.
Bad picture, but you get the idea. From there we would sneak into the kitchen, steal a cup, locate the lolly (from memory I believe they were MnM's) hiding place and fill it up.
Then under the cover of night we'd leave, otherwise we'd act like those creepy children in movies (which we hadn't seen, it was all natural, we didn't know what we were doing) and hang around. climbing onto high benches and watching/staring (like stalkers) our parents.
I think they could kind of sense that we were there like a presence, lingering, a ghost hiding there....
Anyway, this would carry on, most of the time we were caught and sent back to bed, or we got bored and gave ourselves up. We had quite the obsession with sweet things. We used to get the sugar bowl and shove teaspoons of sugar into our mouths.
There was also this really tasty sweet stuff, I don't remember what it was called. Some sort of energizer name. Anyway it was a bright orange powder, probably the kind of stuff body builders put into water or something. The point was we really liked to eat it, it tasted like fizzy oranges, so as with the sugar we'd get a-hold of the tub and heap tea-spoons into our mouths. The parents did not approve
One night my brother and I tried a different approach, I don't know how we pulled it off but we tried the 'wait until after closing hours' technique, like in those jewel heists where they wait in the toilets. Mind you we were like 5 and 6 years old so we did pretty well. At the time we had these:
(Now we have blinds) But the point was that we had such tiny bodies that we could wrap ourselves inside an opened one of these curtains and no one would be any the wiser. We had also pretended to go to bed beforehand (stuffing pillows and soft toys under our blankets, the hair was very realistic. By age 9 I was a pro at making fake-sleeping bodies)
Once everyone had left we got to work, getting to the kitchen, collecting spoons and shutting ourselves up in the pantry. We soon found the 'attempted to be hidden' orange powder stuff. We feasted.
Meanwhile the Dad re-entered the lounge-kitchen room and our uncle was with him. Which we weren't too concerned about, although we had to turn the pantry light off (which was activated by the pantry door so we had to shut it) so we had not light but that was okay.
We whispered about our dad and uncle and watching them through the crack in the door. We had a few close calls where we thought the were going to open the cupboard (which is essentially what the pantry is, you can fit in one person, or in our case, two small children)
They went to watch the TV and just when we thought we'd gotten away with it my uncle was back:
He was very confused, he actually found it very hilarious (being my dads younger brother he would find it funny that his older brothers two 5/6 year old kids were playing tricks on him)
we were not so happy. Our plan was bust.
And we were sent to bed. Our family went through a number of those orange tubs. I don't really remember why or how we stopped getting them, I do remember though, at one point when I was in junior primary school. My brother hid a tub under the decking so that we could access it whenever we wanted, although his new partner in crime was that kid from next door. And I'd found I enjoy being the boss by partnering up with my younger sister. Who was also very fun because not only did she like stealing food and sneaking around. But she also like dolls.
Sometimes we did things in threes, sometimes my brother and I did things to my younger sister (before she joined up with us) But I'll write about that later.
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