How XBox Saved a Kid's Life

Sean started jumping out of his tree house without a parachute when he was six. That was the day I piled the leaves up underneath it and told him not to jump. It worked. Got a great still shot of it with his arms spread and his little legs in perfect can opener position just before impact. When he lived, Tessa was happy. She even posted the picture on her MySpace which was a rather cool social networking sight in those days. Some of our friends inquired after our sanity upon seeing the picture, as well they might. So Tessa said it was all my idea. But my defense was that he lived.

Not only did he survive. By the following spring he was dropping all the way to the ground and landing on his feet. Killed my grass. He found that this was a great way to "lock" the door. See, the access is a rope ladder, so Sean would retract the rope ladder, shut the trap door, and bail over the side. This kept other little kids in the neighborhood from getting into his exclusive clubhouse. It also kept his little brother from climbing up and getting hurt. So, clearly Sean was becoming a responsible adult by the age of eight or nine.

It was actually Tessa who had the next horrible idea. Sean's wooden swing set had become so rickety that I dismantled it and had one of my high school students weld him a new swing set out of two-inch steel pipe. We attached the slipper-slid and conning tower from the old wooden frame to the new steel frame and got several more years of service from the slipper-slide. When I borrowed the steel frame to pull an engine, the slipper slide and observation tower remained standing free and lonely in the back yard. Gazing out her bedroom window, Tessa says, "Sean will probably haul that up into his tree house to make a second story."

Nice going Tessa. Of course, I began running through possible designs in my mind, adding that if he keeps the slide attached, he can use it for a fire escape. The problem is that we count on Tessa to keep us out of the hospital around here. Now that she is losing her mind, we have nothing to protect us. Thankfully, Sean has a proclivity toward computer games. So far this summer he has been perfecting his skills of driving helicopters and killing organically grown robots with anti-matter plasma beams or something. The tree house is still just a cool place for him and his cousin from Texas to have a quiet lunch. They're seventh-graders, after all. And the priority of tree house construction gets downgraded by the more urgent intellectual concerns of trans-dimensional warfare.