Magic Pants

This really happened.

It's a scientific fact that our brain continues to develop as we grow.

Once, when I picked Bryce up from camp, he was wearing a pair of track pants that I'd never seen before. I asked him about them, and he said he got them out of his backpack. But, now that he thought about it, his towel wasn't in his backpack at the time. Neither was his lunch. And his name wasn't on it either.

Are you following me, out there?

He put on some random kid's pants out of a random backpack. A backpack that was identical to his, to be sure ... minus the name I wrote three times on the outside of the pack with two different Sharpie colors, minus the caribbeaner/sunscreen clipped to the outside of the pack, and minus anything that was recognizably his inside the pack.

To you and I, as adults, that'd be a tipoff that maybe something's off. But for kids ... it's par for the course. Mparents have laughed along with me at this story, assuring me that it happens all the time. It's not entirely out of the ordinary for kids to come home dressed entirely in mystery clothing.

But that afternoon, something more horrible occured to me.

"So if you got your clothes out of someone else's backpack, and you're wearing a strange kid's pants, does that mean you're wearing a stranger's underwear, too?" I asked, too horrified to really want to know the answer.

"Nope," Bryce said as he hopped into the car. "There wasn't any underwear in the bag."

Ewwwww!