Sometimes when I walk into my kids’ rooms I find them playing with things tied to the ceiling fans – toys, paper mobiles, or even large amounts of yarn hanging down, spinning in circles.  Think: small sheep flying around the room at the speed of a cheetah chasing a gazelle around a baobab tree (yeah, that’s a real thing, look it up.)  That, of course, is dangerous, someone could accidentally get hung and die!  So I typically demand they stop and send them outside to play with knives and matches in the street.

(Ok, not really, please don’t call CPS on me… again!)

When I was a kid, we were much safer!  Now, I must explain, I have two younger brothers, and sometimes older brothers can be a little, um, mischevious, shall we say, when dealing with their younger siblings.  So we occasionally would have the youngest stand still, playing the role of “target” while we older brothers played the role of “super-Nerf-dart launchers.”  But we were SAFE!!  “Safety First” was our motto!  We even had him put a piece of thick plastic down his pants as a protective “cup” so that the darts wouldn’t do too much damage.  (In case you were wondering, the old Infinity Q45 used to come with a plastic key holder that could double perfectly as a baseball player’s cup.)  So, being boys, we then knew exactly where to aim.  Did you know that Nerf darts make a “dink” sound when bouncing off thick plastic?  My complying little brother gained more and more confidence as darts bounced off, leaving him unscathed.  Soon he was standing there like Superman taking bullets, and every time a Nerf dart would bounce off his manly area, he would say “dink”.

So we were much safer than my kids, with their woven wooly winding projectiles (yes, I did just do that) spinning around the room.  We were the type to think ahead, and prevent injuries before they happened.  But those were different times.  (Boy I hope my kids don’t read this!)

*Dink*