When I was a kid, I loved stickers. No, "love" isn't the right word. Take love and multiply it by a quatrillion and then you might get close to how I felt about them. I coveted them, neatly placing them in a sticker album, which then turned into a photo album. Of stickers.

I was a little obsessive about my sticker collection, I'll be honest, but I feel like my peers were too. Luckily, I did grow out of that phase.

Besides buying teeny-tiny socks and wee diapers smaller than maxi-pads, I was most thrilled about turning my kids on to stickers. Certainly if my children were, in fact, not switched at birth, they too would immediately love stickers and want to keep them safely in a book, squirreled away to only be viewed with sterile gloves and a hazmat suit on. You know, so they wouldn't ruin the finish.

Har-dee-har-har.

So perhaps introducing stickers to a baby was a bit young. My son took one look at the shiny stickers I'd put in front of him and vomited. All over the stickers. As a toddler, he was more interested in the delicious lollipop than the stickers they'd offer after a doctor's visit. I, of course, was knee deep in the sticker basket by the time he said, "C'mon Mama, let's go."

Since he clearly wasn't interested in the stickers, I took a few home to his older brother, figuring my eldest would finally see the light and decide that stickers were, in fact, full of the awesome.

Har-dee-har-har.

My then-8-year-old son, sweet child that he is, decided that what Mom's minivan (hey, let's not call attention to the fact that I have a minivan, okay? Okay.). REALLY needed was not racing flames up the side or one of those programmable LED things that you can stick in the back to read things like, "GET OFF MY ASS" in snazzy letters.

No.

What my minivan needed was DECORATING. And what better to decorate with than a buttload of stickers that I, personally, had given him. So really, who could I blame? ME. That's who.

That's, at least, what I told myself after I painstakingly tried to remove the stickers from the inside windows, scraping at them with a mixture of rubbing alcohol and a paint chipper. That didn't comfort me when I realized that rather than fixing the problem (removing the sticker), I simply created a smeary mess of sticker goo on the inside of my window.

I only had myself to blame, I told myself, when I realized the one he'd stuck directly on the front of the car's hood wouldn't come off, no matter how I tried.

It genuinely wasn't any consolation that it was my own stupidity that caused this ridiculously tacky snafu. It didn't make me feel better at all when I realized that he'd inadvertently made my own ugly minivan uglier.

So I guess it's time to get those flames painted on the side. Or a nice version of three-wolf moon. Because if you're going to be tacky, you may as well OWN it.