things that get broken

There are reasons that we didn't have a lot of nice/fancy things in our home as the kids were growing up.  There is a lot of breakage of things as kids grow from infancy to adulthood.
The sheet rock on the hallway walls was always marred and dented.  Partly because it is a narrow hallway and any furniture that is moved, bumps the walls.  But mainly, I think most of the dents were from little feet.  A disciplined child often had to sit in the hallway.  It was just wide enough for a young child to sit with their back against one wall and kick the wall on the other side. Also because of a narrow style hallway, there were a few dents because of climbing activities.

Sometimes the kids didn't own up to broken things, or tried to play dumb, but sometimes they ratted each other out.
We came home one evening to this note:
Mom, Brady was kiking his sokrball and he kiked it relly hard and brok the back door window. I think bug's are going too come in. I am skrd. Belev me.
Love Roxanne
I could honestly feel her fear as I read "I am skrd. Belev me!" (this was a note I put in our 'save' box)

The strangest incident was a toilet that wouldn't flush.  At all, It would not even drain slow.  The drain was completely sealed closed.  When the toilet was disassembled and removed, we could see that the floor drain was not plugged, so it was the toilet itself.  The toilet was taken to the backyard to investigate the problem.  There was a leather baseball skin adhered to the curved drain in the base of the toilet.  Why??  How can that question ever be answered?  Why was the leather taken off the baseball? And why did someone feel a need to flush it down the toilet? And why would it adhere itself so tightly to the ceramic drain to cause us to spend an entire Saturday removing and reassembling a toilet?

Another evening, we came home to this note:
The toilet broke by Brady playing with it. It was just an accident. The glass (ceramic) broke. The water ran everywhere.  I turned the handle down at the bottom. It was hard but after the water just touched the brown tile I turned it. We cleaned it up best we could.  Sorry! Rachel
(how could we get mad when the water had been stopped, floored had been cleaned up, towels washed and dried?)

The list of broken items could go on and on:

Living room window - toddler throwing a set of car keys.

Van -- teenagers (enough said).

Trampoline -- expected, a lot of usage over the years.

Dishes - expected.

Spoons - always missing, kids must be selling them on the black market.

Wallpaper- brand new wallpaper put up in child's bedroom.  3 foot square ripped off before nap time was over on the very first day. 

Closet door - markers, has anyone raised kids without markers on the walls at some point?

Christmas stockings -- I used a pencil and was writing the kids names on the stockings so I could embroider over the writing.  Melanie decided to help me and wrote her name on hers in a child's handwriting with a black sharpie.
Glass top coffee table - children crawling under the table and trying to stand up while still under the table.

Carpet stains - inevitable. 

Brown swivel chair - a favorite chair. It swiveled, it rocked, it twirled. It was the most comfortable chair we owned. We kept it way after it was torn up and should have been tossed. 

Piano keys -- markers, chipped.  

FHE chart -- rotating pieces with our names on it to rotate weekly assignments.  Names often got lost/broken.

Blankets - taken outside, loved to death, worn out in so many ways.
Worn spots on the roof. teen kids liked to go outside of the upstairs bedroom and sit on the roof. A traffic pattern began to appear.

The kids are leaving the house one by one now, The house is becoming quiet. I'm kind of enjoying redecorating and carpeting, but I'm hoping one day there will be some grandkids running around with markers and loosing our spoons.