Okay....

Today, on a bit of a whim (and a bit of foresight, really, Ana always has the worst chapped lips and when *my* lips get chapped I just pick at them so I do need to avoid that....), I picked up a value pack of Burt's Bees lip balms.

I got a little tin of lip balm and three lipstick containers. One minty, one honey-y, and one pomegranate-y.

Okay, so they all taste a little different, that's cool.

Except then I realized that the mint lip balm is "Soothing, Cooling, Refreshing", and the honey one is "Soothing, Moisturizing, Nourishing", and the pomegranate one is "Soothing, Nourishing, Hydrating".

What the hell?

I thought you could choose between lip balms filled with icky petroleum products, lip balms filled with beeswax, and vegan lip balms. And that once you'd made that important choice, everything else (how it tastes) is just decoration.

But now they're trying to tell me that different lip balms do different things? That they have different roles to play?

This doesn't make my life easier, people! Am I expected to carefully think about what my lips need before I smear some lip balm on them? Ponder this choice? I wasn't planning on using any more thought than "Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Moe"! I DON'T NEED THIS!

Ugh. It's almost enough to make me use Chapstick... but the petroleum...!

Edit: On second thought, the mint lip balm doesn't contain "fragrance" and the other two *do*. This explains why Ana's most recent lip balm (the pomegranate) and the honey lip balm have seemed so... lingering to me. "Fragrance" tends to do that, and I prefer to not have it right under my nose. I'll stick with the mint for me, and use the other two for Ana and Evangeline.

Winken, Blinken, and Nod.

Yakko, Wakko, and Dot.
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
Ed, Edd, and Eddy.
Up, up, and away!
Ego, superego, id.

I could go on like that all day. What is it called when you have three or more names or words in a list, and the first ones all are alike in some way but the last one is different? Like, the newest Sandra Boynton book, 15 animals, has a boy naming every animal in his house. They're all Bob except, naturally, the last one. There has to be a name for this!

Today, somebody asked elsewhere about starting their kid on fish.

And let me just say that I am *so tired* of people referring to eating a new food as "introducing" it to their kid. I know what they mean, and it's certainly not novel, but I can't shake the impression that they're going "Kid, meet fish. Fish, kid. Now you can be BEST FRIENDS! Go off and play!"

But I digress.

The woman said she had no "history of food allergies", very specific there.

Except that many people actually do have an intolerance to foods and don't realize it. Why? Because when they think of "food allergies" they think mostly of stomach upsets - nausea or diarrhea - or they think of hives, or they think of fatal problems.

(And sometimes they don't even realize their stomach problems are food related! They think it's normal to have chronic gas, to be constantly bloated, or to always be constipated/runny!)

They don't think of eczema as being related to food. They don't think of asthma as being potentially triggered by food. They don't think of stuffiness and congestion as having anything to do with what they eat. They certainly don't think of mood and behavior problems as being related to common foods - or if they do, they think of it only in the context of artificial colors and sugar.

Of course, the reality is that food intolerances can cause all of these problems. So I'm posting this as a PSA - if you constantly have any of these problems, and nothing works, or you're so used to it that you just use stopgaps all the time? Try keeping a food diary. See if there's any connection.