We had houseguests a few weekends ago. Our houseguests brought their two-year old son with them. During this visit, it became apparent to my wife and I that we may never have children. Kids are hard work, and we don't like to work that hard when we're at home. We realized what hard work it must be when we watched our formerly fun-loving friends fall into a stupor at 10:00 P.M. after a day of chasing their little boy around. Now, these are good parents, and their son is a good boy, but at the end of the day, they looked as beat as a one-armed mason on the Great Wall of China repair crew. It seems that two-year olds have a predilection for waking up at obscene hours, watching Disney movies incessantly, eating things called fruit leathers, and occasionally running around madly, shrieking and waving their arms like a speed-crazed banshee.

Despite urgings to the contrary, I could not help but laugh when our friends' son engaged in the speed-crazed banshee routine. Our friends have a term for this frenzied motion; they call it "getting your ya-yas out." Apparently, children have gobs of pent-up energy that can only be released by racing hither and yon for several minutes. It actually looks quite therapeutic. After he would finish, our friend's son would happily sit down, pop in Beauty and the Beast for the five- or six-hundredth time, and sing along happily with Belle and Mrs. Pots. Maybe if adults got their ya-yas out more often this world wouldn't be such a crazy place. Imagine, you come home from work, change into your play clothes, run around the yard for five or ten minutes flapping your arms like a bird, pretending to be a steam roller, whatever. When you're finally pooped, you grab a juice box and some rolled-up fruit, plop down on your favorite rug, and wait for the Disney animators to whisk you into a world of singing clocks and dancing candlesticks.

Can't remember what it's like to play airplane? Afraid that running around and flapping your arms might result in a nasty sprain or, worse, cardiac arrest? Never fear. We've devised a way for you to release those ya-yas without looking like too much of an idiot and without exposing yourself to undue risk. To make sure it works, we took three of the most highly touted sub-30K sedans on a workout that left our drivers totally ya-ya-free.

In our quest for the perfect ya-ya remedy, we came up with three prescriptions. One is for a mild case of ya-yas, maybe the sort that you would have on a Sunday afternoon. The next can be seen as a kind of ya-ya inoculation. Taken daily, this could keep the ya-yas from ever being a problem again. The third is the equivalent of Tylenol 3 with Codeine. This cure should knock any ya-yas out of your system for a solid week.