There is an ongoing battle in my house, it all centers around eating.  I was making their healthy breakfast, ok, it was made by Post and involved obscene amounts of sugar.  Like all kids my boys sat there at the table with boxes of cereal around making a fort so one didn’t have to “see” the other.  He spit out his Sugar Pops into the bowl.

“Honey, what’s wrong?”  I asked as he started choking.

“The milk!  It’s expired!”  He was pointing at the milk like it was a dead body.  I picked up the milk and looked at it.

“It only expired yesterday.”  I sniffed,  it smelled fine.

“But it’s expired!”  My other child was also now spitting his “healthy” Fruit Loops back in the bowl.

“You can still drink it.  You see, the expired means, that you need to sell it by that date, then we’ve got a few more days in the fridge before it is bad.”  I poured a little in a cup and drank it, “See?  It’s not bad.”

I pour a little for them, “Here taste it, really, it isn’t bad.”  I think they heard, “Welcome to Jonestown, would you like some punch?”

They both muttered something about me trying to kill them and went from their healthy cereal to healthier Pop Tarts for breakfast.

Children don’t understand what an expiration date means to us parents.  Expired translated means, time’s ticking to get it consumed before it really goes bad.  Growing up, expiration dates held a totally different definition to my mother.  Money was always tight, so expiration dates didn’t really matter, she’d say something like, “Oh that means it had a coupon that expired, don’t worry about it.”

For years I believed my Mom when she said that eating crusts gives you curly hair, since I already had curly hair then she was so sweet to cut the crusts off for me!  What I didn’t know what that the mold started on those edges and if you cut them off, then it’s a “perfectly good piece of bread.”  As a Mom now, I still won’t tell them what I did with a piece of cheese I found languishing in the deli drawer of the refrigerator.