So many things sound like a good idea when you're a mom. You read about them in parenting magazines and you think, "Hey! I need to try [insert-ridiculously-crazy-idea-here] with my kids!"

Someday I'll stop taking those magazine suggestions seriously. In the meantime, how can I call myself a parent if hope doesn't spring eternal?

Which is why I am now faced with the mailbox maelstrom.

Of course, the magazine didn't call it that. What they called it was a great way for children to learn how to take turns and allow them be part of the mail experience. Or some such drivel.

Every day it's someone's turn to check the mailbox. This involves leaning out of the car window and plucking four tons of sales circulars out of the mailbox so they can be disassembled and transported to the recycling bin.

It all started out just like the magazine explained. There was great excitement pulling up to the mailbox, as if the kids were uncovering a lost treasure chest.

But then, one day, I forgot whose turn it was to check the mail.

The magazine didn't mention this possibility.

My children—whose minds, I've been told repeatedly by the aforementioned parenting magazines, are like sponges— couldn't remember who had checked the mail the day before. My mind—which does not resemble a sponge in any fashion, except, perhaps, the fact that is wet and squishy— long ago became a sieve and is therefore barely able to retain my shoe size much less the intricacies of whose turn it is to fetch the mail.

Thus began the Mail Inquisition.

Like juvenile members of the Law & Order cast, my children pressed their cases. I became the unwitting—or perhaps witless— Supreme Court Justice of the Mailbox.

"She checked it— remember she dropped the blue postcard?"

"I didn't drop it. It was already on the ground. Besides, it's my turn."

"She always gets her way—especially if she cries."

"Objection!"

At about this point the sponge that was my brain dried out and I began hallucinating about the joys of Columbus Day, Martin Luther King Day, Postal Carriers Get A Break Day, or any day on which there was no mail delivery anywhere in the world. I didn't care if our mailbox contained a letter saying some distant relative left me a million bucks, I didn't want to drive within a mile of the thing.

You may wonder, as I did, how did checking the mail could become such a battleground of sibling rivalry? Why don't they reserve this kind of dueling for, say, the privilege of unloading the dishwasher or putting away the laundry? Are my children destined to become the next Postmasters General of the United States? Or maybe direct mail queens with a special affinity for bulk rates?

One day we discovered that a black widow spider had set up housekeeping in our mailbox and required eviction by our official exterminator (Dad). You'd think the threat of a poisonous arachnid lurking in a dark corner into which you reach with unprotected fingers would take a little shine off the whole endeavor. Maybe quell their competitive spirit.

You'd be wrong. It was almost as if the whiff of danger increased the allure.

So now I'm looking for the next parenting magazine-inspired idea to save me. I read one that suggested blowing out raw eggs with swizzle sticks, then hand-painting them in Easter colors, could teach my kids the joys of creating fine art.

Couldn't be any worse than getting the mail.