No More Slushies

When I was a kid, my parents owned a "Five and Dime" department store in Shelbyville, Indiana.  My brothers and I had many jobs around the store from an early age: stocking shelves, straightening greeting cards, watching for shoplifters, etc.  There was one job that only the older boys got to do: mixing the sugar water for the Slushy machine.  For some reason, I always thought it was super cool to watch that bag of sugar getting dumped into the five-gallon bucket of water and watch it dissolve away as we stirred it up.  In my eyes, that Slushy machine was right up there with the mechanical horse (that cost ten cents to ride) as the highlight of the store.  We didn't get Slushies every day - when we did, it was a special treat.

Thus, I've got a soft spot for Slushies.  So it is a bit heartbreaking for me to relate the following story of why my own kids will never EVER again drink a Slushy.

At one of our midday stops on the way home from Florida this past Monday we found ourselves in a really clean "upscale" gas station.  Melissa had paid for a coffee at the previous gas station (which was definitely "downscale") and had found it undrinkable.  So now she was on a mission and this place held promise.  When I decided to join her in buying coffee, we felt a bit guilty about our kids having nothing.  After three weeks of denying them dairy, it seemed terrible to deny them a treat of some sort while we enjoyed coffee.  The solution presented itself on our way to the cash register in the form of brightly colored gallons of swirling ice mixture above a massive Slushy machine. Four flavors - something for everyone!  The kids were VERY excited.

By the time we got back into the van, we were all happily slurping away on something.  Most of the kids had mixed several flavors of Slushy together into their cups.

Out of curiosity, I took a swig of The Drama Queen's Slushy: Wow. Sugary!

I thought maybe I had just become unaccustomed to the taste of sugar since I had joined Melissa in giving it up three weeks ago, but within an hour Dats and Ida were in the back seat complaining that their stomachs were hurting.  I noticed the girls, who weren't complaining of any pain, had taken only a few sips each of their drinks.  The boys had all but finished theirs off.  A few emergency spoonfuls of peanut butter were enough to restore some balance to the boys' bellies.

But now I was very curious about what exactly Melissa and I had provided to our children as a treat.  When we got home at midnight, I knew I wouldn't be able to hit the bed immediately after a day-long drive, so I decided to do a little late-night experiment: I took what was left of the girls' now-melted Slushies and combined them to fill one cup full again.  Then I took that amount and put it in a saucepan over heat to evaporate the water. 

When I started to smell burning sugar, I took the mixture off the flame and poured it back into the Slushy cup to see how much had been sugar.  Here's the answer:

And to be perfectly clear, that is NOT just some thick syrup at the bottom of the cup; once it cooled, it could stand on its own, without any help:

The next morning, the kids were appropriately disgusted at this sight.  Not surprisingly, none of the kids asked to consume this blob of sugar and food coloring!  It went into the trash where it belonged.

Feel free to draw your own spiritual lessons from this - I'm sure I could come up with one or two if I were a bit more awake.

But MY only point is this: The part of the parents' job description that says we are to vigilantly guard our kids' well being... that's hard. 

How many of the things offered by this world look so appealing and so very innocent and yet are fundamentally, and sometimes even grossly, unhealthy?  And how do we go about "boiling them down to their essence" in order to see the gunk?


P.S. I can hardly wait to share about our trip to Florida, but I had to get this out of my system first!