By AJ Llewellyn

I heard a wonderfully funny story on the radio this morning about a New Zeand woman who went on an online auction site, her three year old perched on her lap as she bought him a few toys. Kid was happy, mom was happy. Mom then took a nap but the kid who at the sparkling age of THREE decided he wanted more toys and started tooling around the still active auction page.

He somehow managed to bid on - and won - a $12,500 garden digger!

Mom  was amazed at her brilliant kid at first, until she saw the price tag and realized he’d bought a REAL digger. She called the auction site, explained what happened and the item was relisted.

Kids are damned creative, I must say. My father still tells everybody he meets about the time my brothers and I, then living in Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia decided to dig a tunnel to China. We hit a couple pipes and nobody on our street had water - hot or cold -for weeks.

When I was seven (1978), my dad made a trip to Hong Kong and came home with the first push-button phone I had ever seen. The neighbors came and looked at it, the relatives came and looked at it and my father denies it now, but I am pretty certain he threw a party for that phone. He says it was just a family barbecue.

I got awfully chummy with all those buttons and pressed them all constantly. One time my dad caught me on the phone and asked who I was speaking to. I had no idea. He snatched the receiver from my hand and said, “hello, who is this?”

It was a very nice man in Bombay, India.

Boy was I trouble!

Kids have and always will make good use of objects close at hand. Some get into terrible strife - remember that kid Jessica who fell down a well? - but mostly, getting into stupid stuff is a rite of passage. In Hawaii last Christmas, my brothr’s children tore the place apart building forts and secret dens and nobody was more involved in this fantasy game than my best mate, Tony.

When I was nine, Tony had the fabulously bright idea to call the neighborhood Grinch and pester him. Come on, we’ve all done it as kids, crank calls, doorbell ringing. Well, we used the phone. Over and over again.

This time, Tony and I were having a beach party. It was my birthday and we had a houseful of kids. My dad was in the backyard entertaining all the mothers who’d brought their kids. My grandma who helped raised us, was in her bedroom napping. She did a lot of that when we had our friends around. Anyway, there was a new kid in our class, Joe Dale. One by one, we all took turns calling the Grinch who lived across the street.

“Hello,” we said. “Is Joe Dale there?”

“No, ” he said and hung up.

We did this many times, rolling on the floor laughing at our own brilliance. Then Joe Dale called him.

“Hello, this is Joe Dale, are there any messages for me?”

Thank God nobody in Sydney kept guns and thank God, Caller ID was still a high-tech fantasy. The grinch was tortured by us for months, until we thought up a new game.

In our neighborhood, we didn’t try ringing doorbells and running because the women saw everything from their windows. You couldn’t get away with a damned thing.

Yeah, we were sneaky but we were harmless. And the phone-ringing nine year old in me applauds the ingenuity of a three year old digger buyer and I am glad to know little-kid-spunkiness is alive and well and shopping online.

So come on, fess up, what did you get up to when you were a kid? And what about your kids? How spunkiy are they?

Aloha oe,

AJ