The great Mustard vs Ketchup battle of 1980-something

I'll admit it right up front. My siblings and I weren't the nice neighborhood kids. We were beasts unleashed from hell to wreak havoc on the neighborhood.
Have you ever seen that show Malcolm in the Middle? The writers must have been neighbors of ours. Neighbors who are being kind.

My dad and stepmom trusted alone in the house by the time I was 8 and the oldest of us was 14. They should have known better.

They loved to collect antiques. They had lots of antique tools hanging on the walls in the kitchen. Since this is where most food fights take place, it was probably not the most brilliant of moves.

One day my brothers got into an argument over which could shoot further from a bottle, ketchup or mustard. The only fair way to settle this was to try it out. We propped the bottles up a bit on the table with some of the fine irish linen my stepmom kept in one of the drawers. Then we broke out the measuring tape, and started firing away. They went pretty far, but let's face it, nothing works better than the packets. Especially when you pile about 7-10 of those suckers and hit them with a hammer.
I have no idea which went further. There were so many condiments flying around the kitchen no one could really tell. I can tell you 3 things.

*Relish doesn't go very far. Too heavy.

*Owners of neighborhood delis don't like it when you come in and take all of their condiment packets for your experiments.

and finally,

*Mustard and ketchup stains white walls and wooden antiques equally well.

As if they needed further proof that we're crazy.........

This requires a bit of explanation so please bear with me.
Mr X has been growing hair these past few years where before, there wasn't any. Ex: the middle of his forhead. There is this random lone hair that keeps returning no matter how many times I pluck it while he's sleeping. Ok, go ahead and call me mean. I know I am. While I'm at it, I'll admit that I pluck chest hairs to get him to stop snoring. He knows it. It never fully wakes him, just makes him roll over. It works. Yes. I am very mean. That is a story for another day.
Today, it's all about the random hair.
Baby X has been getting those random hairs. No, I don't pluck them. He, like many newborns, had the furriest of elfin ears I'd ever seen. Thick black hair on the top of his ears. Eventually, it fell out.
Then there was the eyebrow. It was pale so really hard to see, but there it was. This one random hair that stuck straight out from the others. It was like a little exclamation point, "here I am! I'm adorable! Love me! Feed me!"
I loved that little hair. I couldn't bring myself to cut it even though I knew I should. It wasn't in his eye, yet, but it was pretty long.
For some reason, every time I'd pick up the scissors to do it, I couldn't. Baby X would look at me with those big blue eyes and smile and I had to put the scissors down.

The other night I noticed it was getting in his eye. Unfortunately, I couldn't put it off anymore. Mr X held his hands and I cut the little exclamation point.

Now the part where we're nuts..................



It's now taped into his baby book.


Someday he is going to open that book and wonder what we were thinking.