Warning to future hooligans.

Okay, okay, I get it. You're rebelling. You are too cool for school and like to hang out at the playground at night, smoking cigarettes and talking about how, like, your parents totally do not understand you. I'm sure you wax nostalgic about how once you graduate from high school, you are going to move to NYC and become a famous actor. You'll leave this place in the dust and never look back. Yeah, been there. Heard that.

But there's teenage angst and then there is just plain meanness. And "swirling" the baby swings each night until they have been swung all the way around the top of the swingset and unreachable for mere mortals is not representative of your coolness. It is rude and a serious pain in the ass for us mothers who are at the whims of children who are addicted to swinging. You ever heard a kid screaming because he's waited all day to get on the swing and he can't? Keep giving it up on the merry-go-round after dark and you'll become all too familiar.

Listen, I can tolerate one day of having to climb like a monkey up the wooden pylons, getting several splinters in the palms of my hands for the effort, risking that once I manage to work up the momentum to knock the swing seat off the top of the set that it's going to fall and hit my kid in the head, since he's throwing a tantrum below. But two days is too much.

Teenagers, you are on notice. If I go out and find you at the playground causing this kind of mischief again, you are in for it. I am going to confiscate your cigarettes, call your mothers and, so help me God, inform you that you are more suited to a career in accounting than on Broadway.

You have been warned.