When we were growing up, my sisters, my brother and I often burned our mouths on stuff, especially hot chocolate, but also pizza cheese. Time after time, due to our own impatience (I'm not blaming the food items or our mom), we scalded our tongues and then let them cool down and heal over, like igneous rocks do, only with sobbing.

And there were other food related injuries. For instance, we were prone to mistaking our small, kiddie fingers for the fast food french fries we were eating with reckless abandon. This appallingly painful phenomenon -- tender fingers nearly severed by razor sharp incisors -- ended when my mother decided that fast food was bad for us, not for nutritional reasons, but because of our self-mutilation. Either way, she was ahead of the curve.

Now though, when I hear a child cry out suddenly at a restaurant, I wonder aloud if he or she is experiencing french fry/finger confusion and its resulting pain. It's at this point that my husband puts his head on the table and says, in an unduly emphatic way, that no one else has ever had the problem, and p.s. if he had known about it, he would have declined to start a family with me. "Don't be silly," I say, showing him my right index finger with little bite scars running up it like bird tracks in the snow. 

"And don't get me started on you guys biting your fingers when you eat open faced sandwiches," he likes to add. "You're still doing that."

Anyway, let's move on to something else. As kids, we often found ourselves in an eating, then laughing, then choking situation, especially with our littlest sister, Muffie, and especially when our parents were out. We'd all be screaming laughing at the table and suddenly someone would say, "Not It!" Then all eyes went to Muffie who would be bugged-eyed and not breathing. Usually it was our oldest sister, Barb, who would get up, walk around the table, stand behind Muffie, move the hood of her sweatshirt out of the way, and pound her on the back until whatever it was, sometimes popcorn, dislodged itself, allowing her to breathe. Then one of us said, "Now, where were we?" You can't tell me that didn't happen to other families all the time.