As you may have read, DQ will no longer offer soda with its kids' meals. Milk or water. This quote, from the Center for Ruining the Fun for Everyone, is precious.
Here is some advice for parents who find themselves in a difficult situation. Place the tip of your tongue on the front of the roof of your mouth, then remove it and open your lips in a circular shape while expelling air. The word "no" will emerge. This will be useful later in your parenting career, when you are called upon to interpose your will between your child and, say, the desire to buy a pony or run away to Portland with a shaggy busker instead of finishing high school.
I admit there were times I was, as they put it, increasingly wanting to order from the kids' menu without explaining why we were not getting a gallon of sugary water. Sorry, hon, but your sixteen tablespoons of sugar must come in the form of juice, because juice contains no less than 10% something that was in the vicinity of an orange. Well, a picture of an orange.
You're not having soda because you're having milk because of your bones. If you do not have enough calcium one day you will sneeze and all your bones will crumble to dust. Do you want to be a pile of jelly full of bone dust? No. Do you want to be obese because I didn't order the diet drink that has as many calories as a shaft of straw? No.
Now eat your Butterfinger Blizzard.
