When I was 4 or 5 years old, I embarked on a very short-lived (and inadvertent) life of crime.

I used a tiny little manual wheelchair back then. When I'd go shopping with my mom, if there was some little treat I wanted, she'd let me carry it around the store and give it to the cashier myself. The problem, of course, is that when you're pushing yourself around in a wheelchair, you don't have any free hands, so the only place to put something is in your lap. And it can be easy to forget that you have something in your lap, particularly if you're always carrying around one thing or another and your legs are used to the sensation. You can see where this is going, can't you?

One day I went grocery shopping with my mom, and she let me pick out a pack of stickers to buy (Muppet Babies, of course). When we got to the checkout lane, though, it was quite chaotic, and I completely forgot to put the stickers on the counter. When we got outside and my mom saw that the stickers were still on my lap, she was mortified (and let me know that I should be mortified, too). She told me that she was taking the stickers back into the store and that I'd have to wait until the following week to buy them, both as punishment and because she didn't have any cash and wasn't going to write another check for $.49. That's when I really got upset, because I loved those stickers, darn it!

As it turned out, when my mom went back into the store to explain that I'd mistakenly shoplifted, the cashier and bag boy pooled their pocket change to buy the ill-gotten goods for me, and if I recall correctly, they even pitched in a sugar cookie from the bakery. So my run as a master criminal didn't turn out to be so bad, after all.

And man, were those stickers cool!