This is the story of how Sharondarella broke her mother's bed:

(We will start off saying that you are NOT, under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, to break the unwritten rules of blahgdom and tell this story to Sharondarella's parents, who live happily, blissfully unaware of Sharondarella's foray into blahgging ... she will be grounded for life if this story becomes parental knowledge.)

12:00am --- Alarm clock in guest room shrills its never-ending wakeup call, the call that no one asked for and no one can shut off because the clock is demonically possessed.

12:01am --- Sharondarella yanks the cord out of the wall, after jerking the bed headboard away from the wall so she can reach the plug. The bed shudders slightly, but Sharondarella figures it is trembling in fear, and to notice fear in another would be rude so she turns and walks out of the room, her work done.

8:00am --- Sharondarella is showering, when it occurs to her that perhaps that shuddering of the bed was caused by the slats coming unhooked from the headboard. Since an elderly cousin will be sleeping in that bed over the upcoming weekend perhaps it should be checked before the elderly occupant finds out the hard way that the bed is loosely attached.

8:14am --- Sharondarella traipses blithely into the guest room and twitches the dust ruffle aside so she can look at the bed frame. A huge chunk of wood falls off onto the floor, causing her to flee in terror.

8:20am --- regaining her courage, (somewhat) Sharondarella creeps back into the guestroom and meanders over to the bed. She gingerly touches the headboard and with a resounding C R A S H the upper right corner of the bed hit the floor, listing drunkenly to one side.

Sharondarella leapt from the room and scrambled back into her own bedroom. Seconds passed like years. No sound from Mommy in the bedroom, no noise from Daddy in the study. She crept out into the hall and cautiously walked over to Daddy’s study saying casually: “did you hear that noise? I think the guest room bed just fell.”

“Okay” says Daddy, completed wrapped up in his computer perusing. “I’ll check it in a minute.”

”I think it broke…” says Sharondarella, innocently hoping her guilt was not apparent.

8:24am --- Daddy examines the bed. Determines it is truly broken. He comes into Sharondarella’s room and inquires: “were you and Cody jumping on that bed?”

“Daddy! What a thing to say!” After a second or two of contemplation, Sharondarella says “I cannot tell a lie. I did not break that bed. It just fell. All by itself. With absolutely no help."

Daddy leaves and goes downstairs.

8:26am --- Sharondarella creeps back into the guestroom again to hide the evidence of her crime. If Mommy saw the clock was unplugged she would know that Sharondarella had something to do with the destruction of that bed. The clock had to be plugged back in and Sharondarella had to do it in Stealth Mode.

Unfortunately, in order to plug the clock back in she needed to move the headboard again. The headboard groaned and shrieked, but Sharondarella ignored its cries of agony, gritting her teeth against the entreaties of the bed. Fumbling and stumbling, she managed to plug the clock back in, leaving it blinking groggily, a mute testimony to her guilt, while she dashed from the room.

9:01am --- giggling like an idiot, braying like a donkey, Sharondarella presents her story to a coworker, realizing as she recounts the morning's adventure that her life is not as she had always thought: Living at home with one's parents when one is an adult (who has previously lived on one's own as an adult) is tantamount to reliving your adolescence. Sharondarella is fond of saying "I have to call my parents. I am only twelve, you know. My parents expect me to check in."

Today she found out that she is NOT twelve ... she is actually only six.