The kids were hyper tonight. At dinner, my son kept standing up in his chair to do some kind of strange hyper cha-cha dance and then airplane some chicken into his mouth. Then he turned around and sat on his dinner plate.

You know how in movies when the hero is trying to catch or stop something just in time they do that slow-motion “Nnnnoooooo!” effect to prolong the dramatic tension and then he miraculously catches it just before the world blows up and time speeds up again and there’s usually a brief moment of utter silence and then total chaos erupts?

That’s sort of what happened after he sat on the plate except that I knew the instant I told him not to move that he would move; and that there was no way in hell I was going to catch it once it fell. So I watched impotently as the plate of food fell from just beyond my grasp; and instead of being rushed by the grateful, cheering throng, I spent the next few minutes picking chicken, celery, and carrots off the floor.