Dept: I ll vouch for them, its true. How did that get on the ceiling?

I'm thinking of this scenario and trying to make it into a math equation.

If you have a plastic 5 ounce container of chocolate yogurt on the edge of the table which is less than three feet high, or less than a meter high from the floor, and you hit the container, no brush the container with your hand as you pass by so the container flips up in the air spilling out its contents, how high can the contents of yogurt go?

Answer 10 feet or about three meters.

Yes, believe it.  No your kids did not throw the yogurt container up in the air, or shake it up and down while it was open.  Yes, it is very possible that the contents got on your ceiling by someone accidentally hitting the container off the table. 

Folks, I too would be a nonbeliever, and I would have yelled at my daughter for throwing the yogurt on the ceiling if I hadn't in fact been the culprit. Albeit an accidental culprit (as opposed to an accidental hero)

There was the container of chocolate yogurt sitting on the edge of the table like this. But opened.

  My daughter was snacking on it. I innocently walked by it and must have brushed it with my hand or elbow as I passed.  I really didn't see it go up in the air.  The next thing I felt was wetness on my cheek, and I looked and saw that I had yogurt on my shirt, neck and pants.  And it was on the floor.   Well (sh)  it happens, said my wife and got a cloth to clean the floor before I could.

Then something caught my eye and, "How on earth did it get up there?"  There was a big chocolate yogurt blotch on the recently painted white ceiling, said ten foot high ceiling.  We all looked at it, but nobody had any idea and therefore said nothing.  I didn't even see the container get flipped up.  I didn't see any of it.  But how did THAT up there get up there?  

Here is the blotch on the ceiling.  Proof of the pudding.

So next time you got a splotch of something in a very hard place to be splotched, and your kid says "I didn't do it, it got knocked off the table and got there" please don't yell at them.  Do some simple arithmetic and make an estimation, that yes, it could have gotten there by the way he/she says.  And give them the benefit of the doubt and don't yell.

Anyway, I still yelled at my daughter for putting the container of yogurt right on the very edge of the table so that anyone walking by could hit it by mistake and knock it all over the floor or as the case may be, on the ceiling.  That was stupidity, I told her, and sent her to her room without supper.