Hoarding! Thievery! Oh, and tasers.

Have you ever seen the inside of a car that belongs to a mother of small children?

Mom cars - and maybe I'm generalizing here - are like little motorized scenes from Hoarders.  Thousands of tiny socks, stray shoes with no matches, stickers with hair stuck to them, sippy cups with cottage cheese animals colonizing inside, at least 4 or 5 undressed baby dolls, and maybe a lone dirty diaper that got stuffed into that little pocket at the bottom of the door because that is where you put things that you need to throw away when you get home but you forget and whatisthatsmellgoodlord????  And the crumbs...ohhhhhh the crumbs.  The Mom Car is where the mom lets her guard down.  Sure, she may look put together, dressed in the finest sweatpants Target can provide.  Sure, she may be able to read One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish while talking on the phone and checking Pinterest and cooking dinner all at the same time because girl knows how to multi-task like she's getting paid to multi-task.  But the Mom Car is a place where the mom can be the person she really can't show to the rest of the world.  Mostly-empty coffee cup?  Throw it on the floorboard.  That note the teacher sent home which you read but don't feel like taking inside and filing in your neatly organized and color coded preschool binder just yet?  Floorboard.  Child hands you a booger from the backseat?  That's right.  Floorboard.  Because in the Mom Car, honey badger don't care.  It's a way of kind of biting your thumb at being clean and organized and put together in the rest of your life.  It's therapeutic, really.  You should try it. 

But like many things in my life, I kind of took the Mom Car idea too far.  I mean, there's Hoarders and then there's Hoarding: Buried Alive.  So a couple of weeks ago, I cleaned out the car and have been surprisingly particular about keeping it that way.  So when I got into my car Monday morning to find it in disarray, I called James to ask him very nicely, of course, if he had, perchance, rummaged through my glove compartment like a psycho and left its contents strewn about, with no regard to my new, clean car habit.  He said no. 

Guys, someone broke into our car.  Right in our own driveway!  Right under our noses!

Well, they really sort of just opened the door and took some stuff because someone (rhymes with Lames) left the car unlocked.  But still, that is NOT ALLOWED.  Under the cover of night, the dirty rats opened my car door, sat inside, ransacked my things and then took my GPS and my empty Altoids box.  What the hell, dirty rats?  And you know what?  I don't even care about the GPS.  I do care about the empty Altoids box because I was saving it to make this...

Source: ohsweetbabies.com via erika on Pinterest

...but if they really wanted my GPS, all they had to do was leave a post-it note stuck to my window, explaining that they're having a hard time finding their way around lately and could really use some help in that department and then provide a forwarding address and I would have mailed it to them.  Overnight even!  With a note saying that Emily (that's what we call her) can be very temperamental at times and totally neglects to notify us of traffic jams but to take good care of her anyway because she's been good to us and has taken us on some mighty fine adventures in our short time with her.  That's what I would have done, because I am nice. 

But they did not do that.  No.  

Thieves, take note:  YOU DO NOT GET TO BE IN MY CAR.  It is my car.  My Mom Car.  You do not get to breathe my car air.  It is my car air.  And more importantly, it is my baby's car air.  You do not get to sit in my seat and leave all your little thief cooties all over the place.  You do not get to touch my things with your little thief hands.  See, it's the touching and the breathing that I have a real problem with.  Don't get me wrong...I would prefer to keep stuff that belongs to me.  Stuff like GPSes and Altoids boxes.  But I'll move on from that because, for reasons unknown to me, you did choose to leave the Cracker Barrel gift card that I keep in the glove compartment for emergencies, and therefore, there is a teensy, smidgen of a chance that I may forgive you for the stealing at some point.  But consider this your only warning.  Hands off, you dirty rats.  Pull this kind of thing again, and you will be hunted down and you will be tased.

"Get your damn hands off her [Mom Car]." - George McFly

On a completely unrelated note, does anyone know if Target carries tasers?