"Tickle-buggy blue!"

Ever consider how some of those silly family traditions begin?

A few months back I had to, via my role as parental referee, change one of our family traditions. And in the months since, I have had to explain this tradition more times than I can count!

It started back with the "slug-bug" thing. My husband taught the kids this one... gleefully shouting "slug-bug" and smacking away until we had three whining kids.

Somehow it morphed into "punch-bug" which my daughter, being the cutesy little thing that she is, had to turn into "punch-buggy".

Then, of course, there were still the resulting arguments such as:

"I saw it first!"
"There were two, and I said it first so I get them both."

To solve these, the kids began calling out the color(s) of the cars they spotted. So "punch-buggy" became "punch-buggy yellow".

And of course, we still got to deal with the ever present:

""Mom, he hit me twice!"
"I did not, I missed the first time."
"You didn't miss, and you don't have to hit me so hard. Mom, tell him he didn't have to hit me so hard."

So being the dictator that I am, I finally reached my limit and announced that "punch-buggy" no longer exists because I got tired of the fighting. As a compromise, we decided that "tickle-buggy" was a kinder, gentler alternative.

We also had to set some other game rules.

• The first person to call a car gets it. No one else can use that car
• You can only use a car in a specific location once per day. If it hasn't moved since you last used it, wait for tomorrow. If you don't know if it moved, it didn't move.
• You can only tickle ONE person per car that you see.
• Just because you didn't find a ticklish spot, you don't necessarily get to continue to try to tickle the person indefinitely.

So now, the family happily drives down the road searching for curvy cars and trying to locate each others' most ticklish spots.

Except for my husband... he still cheerfully calls out "slug-bug" as he wallops everyone else in the car each time he sees one.

Even the 14 year old is beginning to have fun with it, since he discovered that I'm terribly ticklish just below my armpits!

The only drawback? Everyone out there has heard of "slug-bug", but "tickle-buggy blue" sure gains you some odd looks!