Why?

Recently, while making lunch for the kids, I was shaking salt into the macaroni & cheese.

One of the girls walked into the kitchen, saw what I was doing and said, "Stop, mom…don’t use that stuff!"

I looked oddly at her and then at the salt shaker and replied, "It’s salt…why can’t I use it?"

"Ummm…because it’s not salt. It’s sugar."

"No, it’s salt…see?" holding up the salt shaker to her.

"It’s sugar, mom"

"What do you mean its sugar…why would there be sugar in the salt shaker?"

"Well, we did it for the little girls the other day when they were playing tea-party."

"You put sugar in the salt shaker and then forgot about it? Do you know how many things we have probably sugared in the last few days?"

-And as I’m sitting here, I’m thinking that now I understand why some of the little kids had been asking us to pass the salt shaker to them during mealtime. Hmmm, I guess we had been unknowingly sugaring their food.

Why do kids do these things?

Last summer, while browsing at the dollar store, the kids saw a pair of plastic picnic-style ketchup and mustard bottles and talked me into buying them. After we got home they got tossed into the cupboard where they have remained for the last 4 months, unused. The girls found them the other day and decided to put them to use. So, what do they do? Well, into the red plastic ketchup bottle, they put the leftover syrup from that morning’s breakfast. And into the yellow mustard bottle, they poured ketchup. Go figure.

The moral of this story? It is in the best interest of all guests, as well as family members, to thoroughly check all condiment containers for its exact contents, before applying it to any food item.