If you're ever visiting my house, be very careful when you enter the family room.  It often harbors an eight-year-old whose favorite games include Nerf basketball and Nerf target shooting.

Things can get a little intense at times, especially when he has friends over.  They try to slam-dunk that Nerf basketball and crash into the closet door so hard I'm afraid one of them is going to go right through it.

When they get tired of that (or when they all have concussions, whichever comes first) they switch to target practice, drawing pictures on the whiteboard and then taking aim with the little Nerf darts.  I've been finding those things all over the house.  And since he recently got a Nerf gun with a built-in light, he's always turning off the lights to shoot at targets in the dark.

While there are several reasons why I haven't liked having my desk in the family room, the fact that it's a danger (and sometimes a combat) zone is one of the biggest.  Over the weekend, I was working at my desk when a Nerf basketball hit me in the face.  During the same game, several more bounced off my laptop screen.  And stuff is always flying off my desk.

The eight-year-old isn't going anywhere anytime soon, though, so the best answer is going to be to move that desk into another room.  In the family room, it's Nerf or be Nerfed.

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