May I have more, please........
The boys like hot breakfast cereal. So do I. (I am especially fond of oatmeal, no milk, with butter and dark brown sugar....more like a confection than a breakfast food.)
But must they refer to it as gruel? In public? Isn’t it bad enough we usually look like something out of Dickens, must we sound like it, too?

In the children’s defense, allow me to say that we look like the Cratchitts, not Oliver Twist and his working associates......we even have a Martha........when Bridget was very young she looked just like Tiny Tim in the TV version of A Christmas Carol (the one with George C. Scott).