If you have children, you know what the kid ghetto is.  You’ve been there.  Whether you wanted to or no, you’ve been there.

The kid ghetto is where you’re seated at the restaurant when you show up with people requiring booster seats or high chairs.

The basement you find yourself in during family reunions, where your senile great uncle and four nameless adolescent cousins are the only other people hanging out?  That’s the kid ghetto.

Trip to the mall?  The kid ghetto there is that shockingly unsanitary play area you swear you’ll never go to, but one day you push your luck one store too many and that’s where you end up.

Even church has one.  Oh yes, a place as welcoming and forgiving as the church has its own kid ghetto.  It’s the last five or six rows- the pews aaaaaaalllllll the way at the back of the church, where you’re in the liturgical catch-22 of children who can’t see what’s going on and get restless, but aren’t yet behaved enough to be trusted closer to the altar.

You know you’re there when all the missals are missing covers and the smell of Desitin and apple juice hover perpetually in the air.

That’s where we were today for Mass.  Normally, I avoid the kid ghetto, and try to sneak my way into the no-man’s land of the middle pews, but since we had to attend the 5:00 p.m. Mass, we knew we had five potential time bombs on our hands.  …