Quite by accident I discovered an entirely new parenting method. You see, as I have become less physically functional, and my reaction time is a lot slower, my children have found that it takes me a lot longer to get up and so they smart off a lot. Or make faces. Or directly disobey. So, in the process of training the kitten not to get up on the tables, I began using a spray bottle much like this one you see here.
Now you would think, by the way my children react when squirted, that there was some kind of boiling hot lava in the bottle.....but it's just plain old water. And it reaches a smart ass comment much faster and at a greater distance than say, me getting up and smacking the snot out of them. All I have to do now is pick up the squirt bottle and everyone stops doing whatever it was they weren't supposed to be doing. 
Of course, this is what everone looked like for the first week, but now, they are way more used to it. And I once again have the MotherPower......
