OK, it's time for the kids to go back to school.
Parents, can I get an "amen"?
Christmas break - essentially three weeks for public school students in Hamilton County - feels about a week too long. It's those partial weeks at the beginning and end that gall.
Mark KennedyWhy not square off those ragged weeks and give us those days back in August or May when we could put them to better use? Clustering them around the winter solstice is a prescription for chaos, especially if you have sons.
The toy industry understands Christmas-break cabin fever and has created a solution - a toy gun arms race. This is so boys who are homebound for the holidays can release energy in the form of mock combat.
For younger boys, these winter wars involve a cache of Nerf guns - neon-colored plastic pistols and rifles that shoot foam bullets. Hasbro, makers of Nerf products, sells about $400 million in Nerf toys a year, according to reports.
Older boys, say ages 12 to 15, brandish AirSoft weapons, orange-tipped pistols and assault air rifles that fire little plastic BBs.
Both our sons could be arms merchants for these suburban shoot-outs.
Our 9-year-old son got at least five Nerf guns for Christmas, yet by Christmas night we were back on Amazon.com looking for a Nerf vest to hold his ammo. He got upset when I wouldn't let him order a $70 Nerf vest from a dealer in Thailand.
While he was pouting, his big brother disappeared upstairs and returned with an AirSoft tactical vest he stuffed with Nerf bullets. Problem solved. When he is all bandoleered up in Nerf gear, my younger son looks like a baby Rambo.
On the day after Christmas, he invited a friend over for a Nerf war. The two younger boys and their big brothers marched upstairs and laid the rules for what would become the World War III of Nerf battles.
I was watching television downstairs in the family room when the ceiling began to vibrate as if cattle were being driven through the bedrooms above me. There was also an occasional scream.
After about 10 minutes, it all stopped. "A ceasefire," I thought. I wasn't sure if all the combatants were dead or just too tired to speak. I learned later from my oldest son that the younger boys had essentially decided to call it quits rather that pick up and reload hundreds of Nerf bullets.
See, for the little boys, it's more about the gear than the actual shooting. Three days after Christmas, my younger son was already turning his Nerf guns into an art project. When I arrived home from work on Monday, he was painting a Nerf ammo magazine with hunter-green spray paint in the garage, to "make it look cool."
Meanwhile, my older son is smitten with AirSoft gear. Instead of asking for a ready-to-shoot gun for Christmas, he ordered a selection of high-grade spare parts to make his own gun, then spent much of Christmas Day in a friend's workshop, retrofitting an old gun with new mechanical parts.
It pains me to say it, but he has spent almost as much on his gun as I paid for my first automobile in 1976. But he gets positively giddy when he takes me in the back yard and shows me how his gun will rip off up to 60 rounds per second. Toy guns have come a long way since I got a single-shot Daisy air rifle when I was 12.
I thought he was crazy until he told me that another kid had offered him the equivalent of a week of my take-home pay for his new gun. Now I'm thinking about building him a workshop.
When school starts back, we will return to the more familiar rhythms of homework and soccer practice and the guns will go back in the closet.
There they will sit patiently - cocked and loaded - just waiting for the next snow day.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.