{"id":4399,"date":"2013-03-28T03:26:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-28T03:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/?p=4399"},"modified":"2026-10-02T01:35:55","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T01:35:55","slug":"no-more-slushies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/?p=4399","title":{"rendered":"No More Slushies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When I was a kid, my parents owned a “Five and Dime” department store in Shelbyville, Indiana.\u00a0 My brothers and I had many jobs around the store from an early age: stocking shelves, straightening greeting cards, watching for shoplifters, etc.\u00a0 There was one job that only the older boys got to do: mixing the sugar water for the Slushy machine.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We didn’t get Slushies every day – when we did, it was a special treat.<\/span>Thus,\u00a0I’ve got a soft spot for Slushies.\u00a0 So it is a bit heartbreaking for me to relate the following story of why my own kids will never EVER\u00a0again drink a Slushy.<\/span>At one of our midday stops on the way home from Florida\u00a0this past\u00a0Monday we found ourselves in a really clean “upscale” gas station.\u00a0 Melissa had paid for a coffee at the previous gas station (which was definitely “downscale”) and had found it undrinkable.\u00a0 So now she was on a mission and this place held promise.\u00a0 When I decided to join her in buying coffee, we felt a bit guilty about our kids having nothing.\u00a0 After three weeks of denying them dairy, it seemed terrible to deny them a treat of some sort while we enjoyed coffee.\u00a0 The solution presented itself on our way to the cash register\u00a0in the form of brightly colored gallons of swirling ice mixture above\u00a0a massive\u00a0Slushy machine. Four flavors – something for everyone!\u00a0 The kids were VERY excited.<\/span>By the time we got back into the van, we were all happily slurping away on something.\u00a0 Most of the kids had mixed several flavors of Slushy together into their cups.<\/span>Out of curiosity, I took a swig of The Drama Queen’s Slushy: Wow. Sugary!<\/span>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.\u00a0 I noticed the girls, who weren’t complaining of any pain, had taken only a few sips each of their drinks.\u00a0 The boys had all but finished theirs off.\u00a0 A few emergency spoonfuls of peanut butter were enough to restore some balance to the boys’ bellies.<\/span>But now I was very curious about what exactly\u00a0Melissa and\u00a0I\u00a0had provided to\u00a0our children as a treat.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Then I took that amount and put it in\u00a0a saucepan over heat to evaporate the water.\u00a0 <\/span>When I started to smell burning sugar, I took the mixture off the\u00a0flame and poured it back into the Slushy cup to see how much had been sugar.\u00a0 Here’s the answer:<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n

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:<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n

The next morning, the kids were appropriately disgusted at this sight.\u00a0 Not surprisingly, none of the kids\u00a0asked to consume this blob of sugar and food coloring!\u00a0 It went into the trash where it belonged.<\/span>Feel free to draw your own\u00a0spiritual lessons from this – I’m sure I could come up with\u00a0one or two if I were a bit more awake.<\/span>But\u00a0MY only point is this: The part of the parents’ job description\u00a0that says we are to\u00a0vigilantly guard our kids’ well being… that’s hard.\u00a0 <\/span>How many of the things\u00a0offered by this world\u00a0look so appealing and so very innocent and yet are fundamentally, and sometimes even grossly, unhealthy?\u00a0 And how do we go about “boiling them down to their essence” in order to see the gunk?<\/span><\/span>P.S. I can hardly wait to share about our trip to Florida, but\u00a0I had to get this out of my system first!\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was a kid, my parents owned a “Five and Dime” department store in Shelbyville, Indiana.\u00a0 My brothers and I had many jobs around the store from an early age: stocking shelves, straightening greeting cards, watching for shoplifters, etc.\u00a0 There was one job that only the older boys got to do: mixing the sugar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4400,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4399"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4402,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4399\/revisions\/4402"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}