You pass the salt. I'll pass the sarcasm.

In case you haven't noticed, lately I've been saving all my good mommy blogging for The Mommy Blog. Somehow it just made sense to do that, the way that eating bananas with cereal makes sense, and taking a book to the airport, and keeping a barf bag nearby when there's some sort of Address to the Nation on the telly.

But my son makes it hard to not let my mommy blogging spill over into my "whole 'lot a nothing" blogging. He gives me SO much material that I could literally start a blog titled "My Life As Jonah's Mother." I would most certainly be doing that, too, if I didn't think my other three children would eventually resent me for it. Hell, I'd probably do it anyway if I could be sure that it wouldn't result in Jonah seeking solace between the quiet walls of a therapist's office. I can hear it now... "Why would my mother have singled me out that way?! Is it possible that she hated me because I cared infinitely more about Pokémon trading cards than all the wide world and its inhabitants?!" So, unfortunately for the Internet, there will never be a blog strictly about Jonah unless it is BY Jonah. Although I do reserve the right to sprinkle my current blog with his preciousness.

So anyway, I have started this new THING at dinner called "What would you do?" Because I'm always trying to find a way to interject life lessons when my children are NOT in trouble, NOT tuning me out, and NOT crying so hard that my platitudes about how you should "never ever NEVER grab a cactus with your bare hands" just doesn't get digested properly. For my kids, life lessons work best if they are game-like in nature.

So it works like this: I set up a scenario and then ask the contestants, "What would you do?" My two oldest children, highly competitive in nature, work out their answers, trying to outdo the other in terms of overall impressiveness. They get graded on "Applicability." "Creativity." And there's bonus points on "Brown-Nosing Suavity." The game always ends with, "Okay Mom, what would YOU do?" Today's dinner scenario was this: I checked the mail and your Auntie Lizzie just sent each of you a check in the amount of $1,000. What would you do with it?"

Jonah immediately spent well over a thousand bucks on a laptop, Nintendo DS games and enough Pokémon cards to knock out three million acres of rainforest. But he'd like everyone to know that he WOULD share all his wares with anyone who asked nicely. No question!

Toni has a three-year advantage over her brother (not to mention a higher capacity for remembering) and, therefore, was totally schooled. So when asked what she would do, she basically read the script to me: I will give a third to charity. I will save a third. And I will procure some clothing with the remainder since I am a growing child who would like to set a fashionably sensible example for all the children of the world.

As you can guess, Toni won Best Answer, snarky or not. But Jonah didn't seem to care. He was acutely interested in what I would do with an extra thousand bucks lying around. And just when I was about to rip into my spiel about save save save, he said, "Uh-huh. Yeah. But what would you have done with an extra thousand bucks lying around AS A KID?"

Touché.

Yes son, my answer would have probably resembled yours more so than Toni's when I was seven. Although my drug of choice was roller skates. So I might have invested in a nice slab of concrete back in '78. Maybe some knee pads and band-aids. Which, OK FINE, is a lot less useful than your make-believe laptop. Not to mention less aesthetic. And probably not very Earth-friendly, charitable, or educational in nature...

So the life lesson, in case you were wondering, is: Don't invent stupid dinner games unless you're absolutely sure the children won't win.