dragonlady7 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dragonlady7) wrote2019-12-10 01:23 pm
dragonlady7) wrote2019-12-10 01:23 pm
Entry tags:
family groupchat chronicles
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So here’s a thing. When we were kids, me and my sisters, in the 80s, the conventional wisdom was that kids need to drink a lot of juice for the vitamins. Now, it’s generally accepted that it’s too much sugar and your kids should just drink water, or sometimes milk, for the calcium, but juice is just as bad as soft drinks and you really should try to keep them all to occasional treats. But no, when we were kids in the 80s, a significant portion of my mom’s very tight grocery budget went towards trying to make sure there was always juice in the house, because the nutritionists said that was important. So we often had juice from frozen concentrates, and it was often grape juice.
This is all kind of… childhood background, at this point, but I do still remember what it tasted like, and yeah, it was just sugar, there was no nutrition in it to speak of. Still. There was one particular thing about grape juice that is important, and you youngsters who didn’t grow up drinking the stuff constantly might not be aware of it: it stains.
My older sister just texted us all a photo of her youngest daughter, after a celebratory breakfast this morning, with a special-occasion grape-juice mustache. The stuff stains so quickly that it will actually form the outline of most of a cup on a child’s face.
“This made me think of [Middle-little],” Older Sister texted. “I don’t know why.”
I do; because by the time she and I, the older kids, can remember clearly, both of us were old enough to drink a little bit better from a cup and not stain our faces quite so much. We still did, but not as much. But M-l was an exuberant drinker.
“[Middle-little] sometimes got the whole circle onto her face,” Mom texted back. “A dot between her eyebrows too.”
Farmsister, the youngest of us, wrote back “And remember, I drank from a bottle until I was almost in kindergarten, so I never had mustaches, but I remember the bottle being stained purple.” (She also is the only one of us ever to have cavities as a small child. She gave up her bottle in a big important ceremony Mom made up, when she was four, and she had a certificate commemorating it hung on her wall for a good chunk of our childhood, that as an adult I can now view in a rather different light. Listen sometimes kids need things.)
So yes, the most fashion-conscious and glamorous of my sisters, deep down, is most clearly remembered by us for her fabulous grape juice mustaches. She has not yet commented on this groupchat.
So here’s a thing. When we were kids, me and my sisters, in the 80s, the conventional wisdom was that kids need to drink a lot of juice for the vitamins. Now, it’s generally accepted that it’s too much sugar and your kids should just drink water, or sometimes milk, for the calcium, but juice is just as bad as soft drinks and you really should try to keep them all to occasional treats. But no, when we were kids in the 80s, a significant portion of my mom’s very tight grocery budget went towards trying to make sure there was always juice in the house, because the nutritionists said that was important. So we often had juice from frozen concentrates, and it was often grape juice.
This is all kind of… childhood background, at this point, but I do still remember what it tasted like, and yeah, it was just sugar, there was no nutrition in it to speak of. Still. There was one particular thing about grape juice that is important, and you youngsters who didn’t grow up drinking the stuff constantly might not be aware of it: it stains.
My older sister just texted us all a photo of her youngest daughter, after a celebratory breakfast this morning, with a special-occasion grape-juice mustache. The stuff stains so quickly that it will actually form the outline of most of a cup on a child’s face.
“This made me think of [Middle-little],” Older Sister texted. “I don’t know why.”
I do; because by the time she and I, the older kids, can remember clearly, both of us were old enough to drink a little bit better from a cup and not stain our faces quite so much. We still did, but not as much. But M-l was an exuberant drinker.
“[Middle-little] sometimes got the whole circle onto her face,” Mom texted back. “A dot between her eyebrows too.”
Farmsister, the youngest of us, wrote back “And remember, I drank from a bottle until I was almost in kindergarten, so I never had mustaches, but I remember the bottle being stained purple.” (She also is the only one of us ever to have cavities as a small child. She gave up her bottle in a big important ceremony Mom made up, when she was four, and she had a certificate commemorating it hung on her wall for a good chunk of our childhood, that as an adult I can now view in a rather different light. Listen sometimes kids need things.)
So yes, the most fashion-conscious and glamorous of my sisters, deep down, is most clearly remembered by us for her fabulous grape juice mustaches. She has not yet commented on this groupchat.