I hate balloons...

Yeah, I said it. Balloons, you suck. Here's is a Friday Top 5, in chronological order, describing why we are enemies:

5. The inevitable argument over what color/character. Shut up, kid. In my day, there was no way my parents were paying ten, yes, ten, dollars, at Sesame Street Live! (for which they had already paid over a hundred bucks in tickets) for an Elmo or Bird Bird balloon. Be glad I'm not blowing air into the ziploc bag we used to smuggle in your peanut butter sandwich to avoid paying seven bucks for a hot dog you won't eat and calling that a "balloon". Take what you can get.

4. Once the selection is finally, finally made, we get to run the get-the-balloon-to-the-car-safely gauntlet. If you can survive the two minutes it take to pay for your inflatable nemesis without it floating away after your easily distractable child lets go to pick their nose, you then have to convince said child that tying the balloon to their wrist is safer and just as much fun as holding the string, which you both know really is not. Some vendors are throwing parents a bone these days by tying the balloon to some little piece of plastic that acts as an anchor when your child, inevitably, looses his grip on the string. This, of course, jacks the price up to fifteen bucks.

3. Once you leave Sesame Street Live/the circus/birthday party, you get to enjoy driving home with essentially no rear view as your children jerk the balloons around the cabin of your vehicle. This is yet another time I adore having a minivan and actually enjoy it's only drawback, the kids' distance from my seat. Otherwise I would not only enjoy rearview blindness, but also getting bonked in the head with Elmo-shaped helium vessels.

2. Arriving home safely without crashing, the real fun begins. As your children make up games to play with their prizes, you will spend the next two hours shouting, "DON'T DO THAT OR IT'S GONNA POP!" Why children think of sitting on balloons within seconds of beginning to play with one is beyond me. And God forbid you have ceiling fans.

1. Lastly, the worst, absolute worst, thing about balloons, is their slow demise. Each day they float lower and lower and each day you must explain, yet again, about the helium slowly escaping and, yet again, explain what helium is and, yet again, why you can't just open up the balloon and blow it back up. In addition, you shorter, third child can now get hie sticky fingers on the strings and pull the balloons into his needle-nailed (why are babies nails so sharp even after you cut and file them?), chubby-fingered grasp and make terrifying I-am-about-to-pop-this-sucker noises forcing you to wrest it from him and start a maelstrom of crying not heard since he emerged from the womb. And then there's the added fun for you when all the kids are napping and you round the corner into the living room with a freshly heated Lean Cuisine and Diet Coke on your way to watch four minutes of The Fashion Show*, thinking you are alone in the house, only to be startled into dropping your entire lunch by the eye-level, floating specter of a half-deflated Elmo head that has drifted out of the playroom. The pain is over with latex balloons in a few days. But, Mylar balloons? They can stick around until your kid leaves for college. Finally, weeks later, tired of them rolling around the floor, covered in dog hair (and human hair, I am alarmed by how much hair I am apparently losing), you spirit them away in the middle of the night and get to take out your frustration with a pair of scissors and pray the kids won't notice they're gone.

I know, I know I sound like a killjoy. But many's the time I have purposely been the first to leave a birthday party since I know the stragglers wind up taking home the decor. But don't worry, despite my hatred of helium-filled fun bags, my children enjoy as much of a balloon-filled existence as any other child. I still buy them at events and, in fact, bought thirty-six (!) balloons in the Dora color palette for my daughter's birthday one year. But you can bet your ass I sent them all home as party favors.

Happy Friday!

*Isaac Mizrahi is so not the new Tim Gunn, but beggars can't be choosers