I’m eating an otherwise peaceful meal with my barely teen and near teen boys the other night. One gets up to get the milk jug from the fridge (again) to fill his glass. (Honestly, I’m beginning to entertain laying in a feed pipe from the dairy up the road.) Anyway, as his glass nears the full mark, his brother notices the jug is nearly empty. He announces, “I want some too!” and grabs the jug to wrestle it from the other’s hand.

Fortunately, the jug was almost dry so there was no spillage, but it was an opportunity to give a mini-lecture on manners and politeness, with just a grazing across the topic of pointlessness – since there was a full jug sitting 10 feet away in the icebox.

But enough of that… back to the meal. Where a few minutes later, the other decides on another slice of ham. The stuff I cut had all been eaten, but there was a big slab still on the platter along with a carving knife. So he picks up the knife to slay his quarry, but he’s having a little trouble getting his cut started. So big brother bounds across the table to “help”.

“No, you do it like this!” He asserts as he grabs the knife handle and tries to wrest it from his brothers hand. But little brother is not about to relent, and the knife begins to swing around between them as they vie for control.

“Alright FREEZE!!!” I bellow in a voice that made the squirrels in the back yard stop in their tracks. And the knife stopped moving, but was still in both their hands. Then in a quiet and calm voice I ask, “Does anyone see anything that could possibly go horribly wrong here? Anything at all?”

The knife gets put down and everyone returns to their seats. I carved more ham for everyone. There was a solid 30 seconds of blissful silence until they started arguing over whether an 8″ carving knife is a weapon or a tool. This degraded into an argument over whether or not you could have a missile that was not rocket propelled – an argument I yearned for by the time we got to one over whether a Zoid could defeat a Pokemon in battle.

I think puberty is longer from this side of the fence…