Driving along yesterday I heard the most peculiar squeak.

“Stop talking,” I instructed all three kids, who were strapped in the backseat talking all at once to everyone except each other.  “Do you hear a noise?”

Tyler put down his Transformer, who had been patiently listening to one of his epic tales, and listened.  “It’s a squeak,” was his diagnosis, and then he went on with his story.

A half mile passed.  “Everyone stop moving,” I demanded.  “Is anyone rocking in their car seat?”

“No,” the three chimed simultaneously.  Eva added, “Maybe Daddy has to oil the tires.”

I turned up the radio and attempted to ignore it, but it didn’t work.  The squeak grated in my brain, louder and louder, until it echoed like a New York City sewer stuffed with dog-sized rats.

“What the hell?!” I demanded to no one in particular.  “Is there a dying rat in my engine?”

To make a grueling twenty-mile story short, I discovered I drove from Harwinton to Simsbury with my trunk flapping up and down in the wind.  Yes, I was that jackass in front of a stream of traffic—the kind who unknowingly drives with his blinker on mile after mile, plastic shopping bags flying out the backseat window, a pididdle for a front headlight and a cup of steaming coffee on his roof.

The open trunk: a direct result of a well-meaning mother who borrowed my car earlier that day and filled it up with gas.  The trunk button, the gas tank button…it’s all the same.

Mom, about that DNA test I requested all through the teen years?  The one that was supposed to prove you are indeed my biological mother?  It’s no longer necessary.

When I first took to the task of potty training, my first two kids were more than two and a half years old before they discovered the white bowl in the bathroom was for something other than flushing random objects around the house.  My third found out much sooner.  Why?  Not because she was ready any sooner than her brother or sister.  Plain and simple, it was the price of diapers that wore me down.  I was tired of paying fifty cents every time she peed.

Here are 10 more things I’ve been longing for over the past six years—so much, in fact, that I get misty-eyed just thinking about it:

#10:  When every tissue box in the house doesn’t look like this (see pic).

#9:  When thirty-plus-pound, ambulatory children no longer desire to be carried.

#8:  Being able to leave the house without locating, affixing, velcroing, tying and/or buckling a total of eight shoes (including my own).

#7:  Sitting on the couch without a fear of falling (i.e., discovering someone removed every last cushion).

#6:  When every member of the house can blow his or her own nose unassisted.

#5:  Hearing the word “mine” without losing an eardrum.

#4:  Actually being able to keep toilet paper in the toilet paper dispenser (without the house turning into the get-off-my-lawn guy’s yard on Halloween).

#3:  Taking more than three steps without tripping on, then being mocked by, a talking or musical toy.

#2:  No more hooks, latches or gates that perplex me more than they do the children.

#1:  No more pee droplets on, around, near and far away from the toilet seat.  (Well, to some extent, maybe that will never change.)

Parents of teenagers, bite your tongues. As of now, these are my own personal war stories.