It didn’t matter that it was late.  Or cold.  Or that Dave wasn’t home.  Or that I am completely stressed with work.  Or that I had one kid with mouth of pulled teeth and another with mouth of  painful metal.   Or that we were all recovering from the Mommy meltdown that had been building for about a week now.   

Last night we were going out for ice cream. 

Thank goodness the brothers were game to come along because otherwise I would have had to kidnap them for the ride.  I may be desperate but I do not do Dairy Queen alone.  And last night, I needed it bad.

Going out for ice cream is a tradition I have held close from growing up.  My parents would take us to the Nice ‘N Sweet shop where a nice and sweet man who looked like Mr. Hooper on Sesame Street would serve hand dipped cones and sell penny candy.  I would always get the same flavor:  Black Raspberry, because it was purple and how can you resist purple ice cream?  But sometimes we would go to Baskin Robbins where I would choose Mint Chocolate Chip – the green kind.  And when we went to Dairy Queen, it was a vanilla soft serve cone with jimmies. (Those are chocolate sprinkles for you foreigners.)

The pleasure of going out for ice cream revolves around who you’re with – and what you get.

As I drove the boys across town, I asked them the same question I always pose on the way:  “What’s it going to be tonight, fellas?”

 “The usual,” Noah replied.

“Mom!  We don’t want the world to stop turning, do we?” asked Chase, referring to a conversation we had a few summers ago when I suggested that if they EVER varied from their standard orders, the world might actually stop spinning.  This warning caused much amusement, a long discussion, and a bit of research about what might happen if the world stopped turning. (Spoiler alert:  It isn’t good.)  And since then, the boys have not deviated and order the exact same thing.

For Noah, a cookie dough Blizzard using chocolate ice cream

For Chase, chocolate dipped in chocolate — in a cup

For me, vanilla soft serve cone with jimmies

As we sat in the mini van enjoying our treats, I thought about how tough the last week has been, and how busy the next few weeks will be, and I watched my boys eating their ice cream and enjoying the same family tradition that I did when I was their age. 

And I, for one, was glad the world would continue to spin because of us.

Going back to my childhood home is like entering a portal to the past.

In the basement is my pink-painted dresser, with baby dresses inside.

In the kitchen is Danish modern ironstone crockery that my mother acquired sometime in the 1970s, perhaps a grocery store giveaway.  This exact pattern is now a hot item on etsy.  The sight of those plates whisks me right back to 7th grade.

In the closet of my old bedroom are figurines that I collected from age 7 to 14.

And in the attic is a trunk full of hundreds of tightly folded little notes that my friends and I used to send to each other, ranging from 5th to 12th grade.  Remember notes?  Before Facebook, texting, and cell phones, this was our favorite form of secret communication.  Unless the note fell into the wrong hands, which was part of the thrill.  You had to hope and trust the classroom note-passers would act ethically and not intercept or read your words. 

My dad has done an excellent job of clearing out the clutter accumulated by the six people who once lived in the house.  Although an architect we know once said ”if you have shelves, you will fill them,” my dad has done the opposite.  To his credit, he has many empty and half-empty shelves.

The most recent Sunday New York Times Magazine ran an essay by Rich Marin – an only child – who had to clean out his childhood home in a matter of days.   Echoing my headline (and ahem, I thought of it first), he referred to the process as dismantling a personal museum.  He begins with this perfect statement:  “People spend the first first half of their lives accumulating stuff and the last half getting rid of it.  That’s the story of eBay.”

Many of his lines resonated with me, such as “Next, the closets…I started in my mother’s bedroom and lost an hour flipping through a Simpsons department store Christmas catalog from 1974.  Every present I’d ever gotten was in here.  My G.I. Joes with the kung-fu grip and Village People beards….Ker Plunk!”

He keeps digging.  “Here was my groundbreaking Grade 5 project on whales, lifted largely from our Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia.  My mother’s homework from the 40′s….At around 2 AM, I’d try to sleep, to quiet the Proustian rush of memory and emotion set off by every object I touched.”

I often hear people joke, “I have to get rid of stuff, or my children will hate me when I die.”  The words are meant to get a laugh, but there’s a serious undertone there.  A crisis of someone dying or moving to a nursing home is hard enough to handle without the added overlay of having to do an emergency tear-down of a lifetime of accumulation. 

When my mom’s parents went to a nursing home and the house needed to be sold, she and her female relatives were charged with dispersing decades of possessions within a matter of days.  In the heat of August.  In Kansas.  Without air conditioning.  Talk about battlefield conditions. 

By the end, my mom and aunts were so stressed out and overwhelmed, they were just chucking boxes full of stuff into the alley.  As Marin pointed out, the objects are not just objects.  They are memories and stories, full of meaning.  Under pressure, the constant decision making – keep or toss? – can become cripping. 

So I must thank my dad for methodically keeping the clutter out of his house – all the while telling my brothers and me to take almost anything we want.  Best of all, he has accomplished this while keeping his home cozy, and devoid of tumbleweeds.  Not an easy balance to strike.

On Sunday evening Noah and I got into a spat.  And it was a doozie – lasting several hours.  I usually leave the Battle of Wills Steel Cage Extravaganzas for Dave.  He is much better at holding a grudge than I am.  And to be frank, going 15 rounds with a 12 year old when you know who is ultimately going to prevail is a tad boring.  While the kid could probably inflict some serious pain on me, he still does what I say when I say it loud enough.  Where is the challenge in that?

But admittedly, it is getting tougher to decide who is the winner of these bouts.

It began with a dispute over homework and Noah’s insistence to procrastinate until the last possible minute to get started.  Or.. it started with my relentless nagging when he clearly had everything under control.  Advantage:  Son.  I do nag.  It’s a core competency of mine.

From there it escalated when I refused to let him bid on a video game on eBay when he still owes his brother $40.  It was the deal of a lifetime and Chase didn’t need the money right away anyway.  Advantage:  Mom.  The kid has to learn to pay his debts.  No two ways about it.

His surly mood made him unfit to join us for dinner at the local Indian restaurant so we left him at home which resulted in a much more pleasant dining experience but I felt sad.  That is the first time we actually kicked him off the family island.   He had no desire whatsoever to sit a table with his arch nemeses for any length of time and was happy to stay home.  Advantage:  Son.  He knew a family dinner wasn’t a good idea.  I am often a little slow in this realization.

Upon returning home, I decided to check the online student/parent portal where I saw that he had failed to turn in a few math homework assignments which brought his current grade level to a letter that rhymes with “Peff”.   He was already planning to fix this and it was early in the marking period so it WILL ALL be fine.  Advantage: Mom  He got caught not doing his assignments.  A valuable lesson in the consequences of slacking.

Throughout the rest of the evening he continued to suggest that I was a candidate for the worst mother of the year award because I make too big a deal out of things AND I won’t let him buy an online video game.  He is repeatedly sent to his room where he remains for 3 minute intervals, only to emerge once again to make his case as to why he is right and I am wrong.   I never listen to him.    Advantage:  None.  He isn’t capable of letting it go and accepting his punishment.  I am apparently not capable of making him.

I go to bed feeling lousy, wondering if I am on the road to becoming one of those mothers for whom nobody can understand why her kids are so f%&*ed up when she seems perfectly normal.  He goes to bed feeling lousy because he is now worried about his math grade (a little) … and he really wants that video game.   Advantage:  None

Throughout the smack down, Dave is uncharacteristically disengaged.  I think he was enjoying my role as the  bad cop for a change.   And Chase did a pretty good job hiding his smirk most of the night.  I know that was hard for him.  Advantage:  Dad and Little Brother  They had ring side seats to an evening’s worth of free entertainment — all in 3D.  

It took until last night for both Noah and me to come around.   I offered a back scratch (all men are helpless against the healing power of my nails) and helped him with math homework;  he offered to perform chores around the house this week to pay his brother back and have enough left over to bid on the video game.  After 24 hours of  The Cold War, I think we were both ready to watch all that bad water flow under the bridge and be friends again.   It felt good.   A grudge is a heavy thing to carry around — especially when it is so easily lifted.

I know my efforts to teach Noah the importance of respect and responsibility have only just begun.  Luckily this time, we both got schooled in a bonus virtue to boot.

Forgiveness.   Advantage:  All

Good morning to you! 

I got that line from Matt and Meredith.  They say it to each other all the time on The Today Show, and it always sounds a bit babyish to my ears.  Maybe because when the boys were toddlers, we took them to Makin’ Music and they sang a song involving those very words.

But today, I am not ranting about M&M, both of whom I like very much. 

Although it is dripping with rain outside and the color green is saturating everything, the view from my window is not entirely jungle-like.  There are wonderful bursts of color around the house, which are a feast for the eyes – mostly pink and blue. 

This is the most gorgeous time of year in the Philadelphia region.  Banks of azaleas dripping over stone walls, wisteria in full bloom, a lone tulip that has not been eaten by deer (disclaimer:  please note this is located next to our soon-to-be-razed garage and we’re not bothering to tidy that bed up) and weeds that have not yet come up and ravaged everything….for one brief shining moment, things around here look a tiny bit like Sissinghurst. 

As a mother of growing boys, I feel it is my responsibility to school my sons in certain lessons related to fashion.  After all, if not me, then who?  Their father?? God bless Dave but his idea of dressing up is wearing a collared golf shirt, a defining principle which he has somehow passed onto his sons, despite my best intentions. 

To all you Mothers of Daughters and Metrosexual Boys out there, I know how lucky I am that my boys give a flying you–know-what about what they wear each day.  Their ambivalence has saved me thousands of dollars and hundreds of shopping hours.  For this gift, I am truly grateful.  Yet, while I don’t subscribe to buying high end designer clothes for them, I do like my boys to leave the house looking like there is someone at home who tortures cares about them each day.  And despite their stark differences in personality, their fashion faux pas list is identical, including some of these winners: 

Color Blindness:  Remember Garanimals?  I think a tween appropriate version of Garanimals, clothes that identify matching counterparts on their tags, would sell very well.  Anything that keeps these boys from pairing orange shirts with red shorts is worthy of premium pricing.  They also tend to embrace the monochrome look where they resemble Fruit of the Loom characters. This breach is especially hard to explain when they ask, “What is WRONG??  It’s ALL green!”

Open the Flood Gates:  I’m starting to feel as if this could be a generational thing because every time I point out to my guys that they can’t wear those pants because they’re “floods”, I get a blank stare back.  I then explain (again) what “floods” are and how a kid could get shoved in a locker for wearing them.  Again, the blank stare which suggests to me that “floods” are ok these days.  I still make them change.

Sock Infraction:  It’s hard enough to get the boys to put anything on their feet except their slip-on Vans so when they put on dress shoes with white gym socks, I hesitate to make a stink and risk losing the battle and the war.  However, the white sock / flood pants combo is a deal breaker.  But man, it’s as if donning a colored dress sock is equivalent to walking on hot pokers.

Tuck, Everlasting:  I honestly think they do this one just to bug me.  Whenever an outfit requires a shirt tuck (i.e. with a jacket and tie, baseball pants) they insist upon leaving their shirts out, lamenting about how uncomfortable the tuck is.  Yet, every now and then for no apparent reason, they embrace the tuck as if there is no tomorrow, shoving their shirts WAY down into their pants and bringing the belt up HIGH.  If you thought tucking was uncomfortable, you should hear the pain they articulate to untuck.

Minty Shirts:  I have learned that it is always best for the boys to dress last before leaving the house.  Their shirts are magnets for anything chocolate but they also seem to attract toothpaste spit on a regular basis.  My encouragement to “spit far” has been translated into “spit hard” which causes back splash and unfortunately even more of a mess.  

And so my quest continues.  I know that boys will be boys and minor fashion violations never hurt anyone but there is something called self respect that needs to be acknowledged – even if it’s just mine.

My old Missouri home was a border state, harboring both Union and Confederate sympathizers during the Civil War.  Parts of Missouri even seceded.  There was the Kingdom of Callaway with its capitol, Kingdom City – now a not-so-regal truckstop between Columbia and St. Louis.

Columbia is, I realize every time I go back, a Southern-Midwestern kind of place.  You hear traces of Ozark accents, even hints of Kentucky and Tennessee, in voices all over town. 

Proof of the divided mindset of my homeown is found in the names of these two downtown elementary schools, located one mile from each other physically – but once a world apart. I’m sure that families sent their kids to the school that matched their side of the Civil War.

A dude in overalls is not a rare sight in Columbia.  I mentioned to my dad that I never see guys wearing overalls and he said “Even little boys?”  OK, that’s the exception.  Every day of my visit, I saw a different grown man wearing overalls, but I also saw lots of professors, professionals, and posers.  Although Columbia is a college town, home to MU, Stephens College, and Columbia College, it is surrounded by farmlands – giving it a unique mix of visitors.

My brothers and I even represent a mini Civil War.  Two of us are liberal, New York Times-reading Democrats.  The other two are active Republicans.  The Democrats live in the Easternmost cities, the Republicans are in more traditionally “wild west” locales.  We try not to bring up politics when we’re together, and if that’s impossible, then we just don’t mention Sarah Palin.

Even the housing stock of Columbia is a fascinating mish-mash of styles.  Some people still live in Quonset huts, those WWII left-overs.

Some live in charming fairy tale cottages.

Others are in fabulous, home-tour houses. 

I could drive around all day just feasting my eyes on the wonderful mix of architecture in Columbia.  I always wonder why magazine editors have not discovered this place.

I had an action-packed few days visiting my dad, borrowing his computer, doing a five-mile-hike with him (16 minute miles!  Difficult for me to keep up!) on the Katy Trail, a former rail line, going to Rotary Club and First Baptist Church, attending a ceremony at the MU Library in honor of an endowment my parents set up, and helping host a going-away party for lovely neighors who are moving to Texas.

Although like Dorothy I am originally from Kansas, Missouri is where we moved when when I was 8.  There’s no place like home.

This past weekend as the family traveled to Maryland for the triathlon, we were faced with a familiar “situation” in our hotel room. 

“Who do you want?” I asked Dave.  Since he was racing, I thought it was very big of me to give him his choice of squirmy kid to bunk with.  He did the math in his head and quickly selected the child with the lower body mass and softer skin: Chase.  Seriously, the boy is like a giant teddy bear.  Rather than protest outright (because remember I am completely selfless), I casually mentioned,

“You know, sharing a bed with Noah could get more than a little creepy for me in the not so distant future.” 

“I know,”  he responded, but strangely didn’t think that the “not so distant future” meant later that night.  Dave is no fool. 

But my rationale for having the Mommy sleep with the 10 year old son rather than the 12 year old son was not without merit.  Aside from the fact that sleeping with Noah is an exercise in self defense (think flying elbows and talon toenails), I am indeed starting to get a little self conscious about it.  Despite the most genuine intentions, I’m thinking that “spooning” with your child who is almost as tall as you are crosses some boundaries.  But which ones, I’m not sure. 

This dilemma falls squarely in the category of parental judgment calls I refer to as the Age Old Questions — as in, “At what age is your child old enough to stop/start  ______________ ?” 

These questions are fraught with landmines.  Co-sleeping is powder keg of a topic when your children are babies; imagine the hissy fits thrown by the self righteous on both sides of the argument when your kid is old enough to have his own Facebook page. 

For this reason alone, you are smart if you ask only your most trusted confidantes their opinions on the Age Old Questions, because they won’t judge you when want to pack a bottle in your second grader’s lunch box hold out a little longer than they might. Also, you probably do not want to ask your husband the Age Old Questions because his response will inevitably vary 12 to 24 months from yours.

Especially if he wants a good night’s sleep.

I’m back in my childhood home in Columbia, Missouri, where I’ve spent a wonderful few days with my dad and 66% of my brothers, not to mention my dad’s girlfriend, plus lots of neighbors and some dear old friends.

I love coming back to my childhood home and finding stuff in basement, closets, and drawers – familiar old favorites like the plastic characters who sat on our spoons to make cereal eating more fun, the cube-shaped cork pencil holder that is now all the retro rage on etsy, or the pink pincushion my mom and I found in an Oxfam shop in England.

This time, I also re-discovered a typewritten account called MY FATHER, written by my great-grandmother’s brother.  This memoir is also the story of her father, obviously – my great-great-grandfather.   Our family’s version of Little House on the Prairie, it begins with the harrowing tale of how my great-great-great grandfather Wilson Kelsey, his wife Jane, and their four boys and three girls journeyed 1200 miles from upstate New York to Wisconsin in 1855.  Wilson purchased 160 acres of land in Minnesota for $1.25 per acre, and the family moved into a one room log house on the property. 

Jane saved the eyes of potatoes throughout the winter.  “They planted potatoes, they planted corn.  The two older boys hoed the corn.  The family lived in one room, slept on hard boards covered with a straw mattress, had the roughest kind of furniture, bunks and benches with a rough pine table.  Jane got up at 4 AM and worked until 10 at night.  She cooked over an open fire in the fireplace, her hands were busy constantly;  she sewed, she knit, she busied herself with the countless household tasks from morning til night.  By fall their clothes, even their shoes, were gone.  Jane made pants and moccasins out of grain sacks.”

The story continues:  “The family was happy.  Everyone was busy.  True, there was the ever-present threat of Indian raids which must have been some worry to them, but the raids did not come against them, although settlers were killed not far from Cherry Grove.  But Wilson drank.

“It is entirely probably that Wilson lost one farm after another back in New York, and was reduced to becoming a day laborer, because he drank.  This problem did not come up in the family in Minnesota until they began to sell their produce.  They did this at Red Wing, 35 miles away.  The trip took three days, was made with oxen, and required an overnight stop in Red Wing.  Wilson drove there and back and did not always bring back all of the money he received for the produce.  One morning when the wagon was all loaded, the oxen hitched and everything ready to go, the eldest son climbed up on the seat and announced that he was going, which he did from that time on.  Wilson eventually quit drinking.”

Never do I come to my childhood home to do scholarly work, but this passage fascinated me, because I had just read a revelation in “The Botany of Desire” by Michael Pollan (which I was thrilled to find in my childhood bedroom, because I needed a Pollan book for our April book club meeting.)   In this book, Pollan punctures the myth of Johnny Appleseed.  Johnny wasn’t in the business of selling apples to eat.  He was selling apples to drink.  Pioneers, it turns out, got drunk on hard cider – applejack.  “Corn liquor, or white lightening, preceded cider on the frontier by a few years, but after the apple trees began to bear fruit, cider – being safer, tastier, and much easier to make – became the alcoholic drink of choice.  Just about the only reason to plant an orchard of the sort of seedling apples John Chapman had forsale would have been its intoxicating harvest of drink, available to anyone with a press and a barrel.”

Downstairs in my dad’s house, fortuitously, was another of my favorite books – Family, by Ian Frazier.  Stay with me here, because Frazier sheds even more light on the story of alcohol and pioneers in this passage.  “An upper-class Englishman who traveled the frontier in 1817 and 1818…said that the people he saw looked old at an earlier age than people in England.  He thought this was because frontier people had few comforts and bad clothes and poor hygiene.  He called the last ‘the greatest pest, the most fertile source of disorders, among them.’  Most frontier farms could be made to produce a crop of corn or wheat within the first or second year;  selling the crop and shipping it were more difficult.  As whiskey, it traveled better, kept longer, and could be sold or traded.  Many of the Scots-Irish settlers not only knew how to distill whiskey, they were good at it.  People said that some of the whiskey you got on the frontier tasted fine.  For years it was much easier to find good whiskey there than good coffee.  A traveler to Ohio and Indiana in 1827 reported that whiskey was drunk like water.  An Indiana county history says that in those days people thought it was impossible for any man to work in the harvest field without the use of whiskey.  People drank it out of bowls, teacups, gourds.  Most preferred to take it straight.  It was watered down and given to children.  Schoolteachers were paid in it.  Lake schooners were christened with jugs of it.   

Before elections, candidates for public office often left barrels of it in their names for customers at groceries to help themselves. It entered even the most casual social encounters….This may all sound raffish and fun, but for many of the children who watched the effect of whiskey on ther parents, it wasn’t.  The first generation to grow up on the frontier produced tens of thousands of anti-liquor reformers, members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and Sons of Temperance, whose cause became a nationwide movement which would eventually result in the prohibition of alcoholic beverages with the Volstead Act of 1919.”

OMG, Ian Frazier had just, in one fell swoop, explained several generations of my mom’s family.  My great-grandmother indeed became a devoted member of the WCTU. So zealous was she that she even traveled to Sweden for a WCTU convention in the 1930s and brought back a pin – which I now own.  As children, my grandmother and mother both signed pledges never to drink – a promise they kept all their lives.  I always thought it was because they came from religious families – I never knew the backstory of their forebear, the hard-drinking frontiersman whose drunkenness nearly ruined his family and put the fear of God into several generations.

The whitewashed story of how the west was won, as taught from boring textbooks in the 1960s and 1970s, never mentioned a populace threatened by alcoholism.  I’m sure I never heard a teacher or professor bring this up in a lecture.  Either I was paying no attention, or this tale was simply not told.  I am grateful to Michael Pollan, Ian Frazier, and old family documents for enlightening me and for explaining what is, in the end, a much richer story of American pioneering.

This past weekend I was a big fat quitter.  And I’m feeling rather proud of myself.  I was registered to race in an Autism Speaks Sprint Triathlon in Bethesda with Dave, Doug and Mo.  Physically I knew I was capable, but I had been hearing those voices for the last several weeks which were asking me,

Ultimately, my argument against the voices wasn’t compelling enough to race.  So I happily cheered on the sidelines with the kids.  But it raised an issue that I have grappled with as both an indiviudal and a parent over time:  When is it okay to quit?

While quitting bad habits is perfectly acceptable and arguably favorable, quitting a voluntary activity is generally frowned upon by society.  So much so that we find ourselves encouraging our children not to be quitters.  It is our instinct to insist suggest that they stick it out and keep trying, but I wonder if sometimes we are doing them a disservice.

As a youngster, Chase happily followed in Noah’s footsteps and joined karate.  But after a few years, it became more difficult to get him into his uniform and to class each week.  On more than one of these weepy occasions, I would ask him if he wanted to quit.  This would make him more upset and he would desperately sob “NO!!!”  He just didn’t want to go THIS time.  But when THIS time became EVERYTIME, we knew it was time to stop. 

It wasn’t until we positioned quitting as a positive thing that he was able to say, yes, he wanted to quit.  He needed permission.

The same held true for my triathlon this weekend.  Despite the fact that I began to clench every time I pictured the race, the thought of quitting was very upsetting to me.  After all, aren’t quitters the biggest losers ever?  I resisted it until just a few days before the race when I told the rest of my team that I didn’t want to join them on the course.  Once they gave me “permission”, I felt better.   In fact, I am newly inspired to quit more things.  It feels good.  Maybe I can get my kids to quit some things too!

Here is my new Quitters Litmus Test:  

If the answers to all of these questions are “no”, then quitting is probably the right choice.  For you.  For your kid.  For anyone.   Because life is too damn short to be voluntarily spending time doing things you don’t want to do.  For me this past weekend, quitting was harder than actually running the tri, but I did it with the conviction and commitment of a true winner.  And we are all better off.

In 4th grade, Ian came home one day in April announcing that it was National TV Off Week.  The children in his classroom were all encouraged to give this a try.  Chris and I were game.

The first day of withdrawal was terrible.  The boys were cranky.  The little brothers were angry at Ian for suggesting the idea, and at Chris and me for taking away their drug of choice.  I no longer had the electronic babysitter to “help” me – but we were going to stick it out.  We were no longer hearing the idiotic voices of deeply unfunny Nickelodeon cartoons, reason enough to never go back.

The second day was better, and by the third day, the boys had kind of forgotten the TV.  They played in their rooms or out in the yard.  They read library books we had loaded up on.  They got out the Uno game.   There were fewer family feuds.  This syndrome is well known to the granola-making, home-schooling, sweater-knitting bloggers I read.  Many of them have made TV cozies out of linen, appliqued with felt birds, to put over their tubes so the kids don’t clamor for so much screen time.  The pattern, which was explained in tutorials and shared on-line,  had to be altered for the infusion of flat screen TVs.

So anyway, the experiment imposed by Ian’s 4th grade teacher was so successful that we made it a rule for all schooldays.  No TV unless it’s Friday, Saturday or Sunday.  This went on for years, quite successfully.  There were times when I’m sure a voodoo doll was made of Miss H, but for the most part, the status quo was accepted.

Now the boys are older, they get out of school at what seems like noon, so in theory can knock out homework by 4 PM, and the no TV on schooldays rule has slipped away. 

The boys are all fans of the show Myth Busters, which is a great way to teach a love of scientific experimentation.  They’ve learned all kinds of obscure facts from the show, and of course you can’t beat the explosions.  The creator of Myth Busters must have been the parent of young boys.

The relevance to my life is that I’ll occasionally use an expression which my sons point out is incorrect.  If I say:  “That guy is so clumsy!  He’s a bull in a china shop,” then from the backseat will rise a lecturing voice.   “Actually Mom, if you surround a bull with racks of china figurines, he will walk very carefully and try to get out without touching anything.  They did that on Myth Busters.”  If I say:  ”My offer went over like a lead balloon,”  I will hear from across the dinner table:  ”You know, Mom, lead balloons actually float quite well.  I saw it on Myth Busters.”

I now know better than to suggest my boys run in a zig-zag pattern while being chased by crocodiles, or that our car will be blown off the road by the force field from a speeding on-coming snow plow, or that anyone would be able to swim away alive from an oceanic whirlpool.

Conclusion:  Not all TV is bad.  As this year’s National TV Off week comes to a close, I am grateful to those crazy guys and one gal on Myth Busters.  Even if they have tainted some of my favorite expressions.