Sock Decoys

How many of you have children that “borrow” your clothes, never to return them?  I would probably be flattered if my daughters borrowed anything of mine.  I’m “hopelessly quaint” or “delightfully old fashioned” they say, with a wink to each other. Yeah, I know.  I wear Mom pants.  I’ve given up the sweatshirts with flowers and birds on them though.  So there is hope for me yet.

 

But when our daughters were teenagers, they borrowed stuff way too liberally for our tastes.  Even my husband was not immune from their purloining little fingers.  Especially when they needed to do their laundry.  His socks would start disappearing.  Eventually we’d find them in piles on their floor.  They’d do their laundry and ours too with vast and sweeping apologies.

But my husband could not keep his socks kept disappearing. Being crafty and wise old geezer, my husband HID his socks.  That didn’t work.  His stash of socks was discovered and disappeared regularly.

But he is really clever as well as crafty and wise.  Next time they did the laundry and put his socks in their usual place, he knew they would have their own socks for a little while.  He hid all but one pair of his own socks, which he set in their usual place as a decoy.  Our daughters were not brazen enough to take his “last” pair.  The rest he hid in several different places. 

He blithely wore fresh socks from his secret sock hiding places, and they never discovered the sock decoy trick.