I awoke this morning to the sound of Green Day wafting up through every vent in our house. My son is taking drum lessons, and he got a drum set this weekend, so now he puts on Green Day and plays along - at six in the morning. I went downstairs and gave him a standing ovation, then poured myself a nice tall glass of egg nog - nector of the gods (albeit gods with high cholesterol and more fat grams before 7am than should be consumed all week).

I love egg nog and can't understand anyone who doesn't just dig the stuff. While the name itself is enough to turn someone off (an egg, I know what that is, but what's a nog?), who can resist such a creamy confection? Well, my kids, to start. They practically scream every time I suggest they try a sip of my egg nog. Much like the reaction I got two nights ago when I had a brain storm and decided to make them chicken pot pies for dinner (is that the pie thing? they wanted to know, we don't eat pie things). I told them it was soup in a bowl made of bread, and then forced them to eat it (my kids also can't even stomach the idea of mayonaise, so last summer when my mom tried to pass off a turkey with mayo sandwich on my son he freaked out and practically ran away - she told him it wasn't mayonaise, it was bread spread, and hoped she could put one over on him. It didn't work).

So this morning as I downed a half gallon of egg nog, I shook my head at all the yummy things my kids were missing out on. I mean, where'd they learn to act like that? And then I remembered a time in college when I was babysitting for a family and made myself a tuna sandwich with some tuna in the frige. Well, one bite into this sandwich, and I almost had to call poison control. I quickly picked up the phone, dialed my friend Vicki who'd babysat the day before.

"Did you make this tuna?" I asked her.
"Yep," she told me.
"What's wrong with it," I wanted to know, on the verge of keeling over dead right there on the kitchen floor.
"I put in a little mustard," she told me.
Mustard!!! I hate mustard. Can't stand it. Even a little pinch on my tuna sandwich is enough to gross me out.
So I thought about my reaction to a little mustard and immediately understood the finicky kids dissing my egg nog. But that's okay. All the more for me.

(on a completely different note: when I searched google images for egg nog, the first photo that appeared was a woman in a g-string having egg nog poured over her ass - what's up with that?)