My youngest is in some deep doo doo this evening.

He play with the kids at the end of our street quite a lot...his little friend W lives down there, and there's a family next door to W that has 2 boys aged 14 and 12.  Both the boys have developmental disabilities, one (J) has Aspberger's syndrome and the other (M) is educationally subnormal.  They play with the younger kids a lot, mainly (I think) because they're of the same mind set.

So, my Jake had gone off to play with W this morning, and I had gone outside to feed my roses.  I was setting up the sprinkler and I heard this 'crack' sound that sounded remarkably like a gun shot come from the end of the street.  As I headed down there I saw W's mom come flying out of her house yelling "what the hell was that???"...so I stepped up the pace a bit.

When I got there, I found Jake, M, and W in the back yard.  Jake had a magnifying glass in his hand, and M had 2 firecrackers in his hand.

M had given Jake a firecracker and told him to try and light it with the magifying glass.  Jake, not knowing any better and having had no experience with fircrackers, had done so.

I have so many issues with this I don't know where to start.  First of all firecrackers are illegal on base.  I don't know about the state, but on base, you can't have them, or any other fireworks.  You're not supposed to have possession of them, you can't have them in your car, in your home, on your person...you just can't have them.  Secondly, how in the hell did M get his hands on them?  Thirdly, what the fuck was my boy thinking??  It's pretty obvious that he wasn't, I think.

So, I dimed M out to his dad....who wasn't very happy that M had found the firecrackers and had taken them outside.  My Jake got marched home and we had a long, somewhat graphic talk about why you shouldn't fool around with fireworks (I was tempted to show him pictures of amputated fingers, toes and third degree burns but decided that a graphic description would suffice), why you shouldn't start ANYTHING on fire with a magnifying glass or any other kind of incendiary, and why it's not cool to do things that other kids tell you to do, especially if they tease you into doing it.

Jake's grounded for the rest of the weekend.  He's lucky his dad's not here...or else my grounding would have looked like a stroll in the park in comparison to what his pops would have dished out.

I still can't believe he did it.  I mean, I know he's no angel, but I really didn't think he'd ever do anything quite so stupid.

Guess he proved me wrong today, huh?