A grandparent is the only baby-sitter who doesn't charge more after midnight - or anything before midnight.

When you're lecturing teenagers and they begin to hum and leave the room, you can sense there is hostility.

Someone once threw me a small, brown, hairy kiwi fruit, and I threw a wastebasket over it until it was dead.

Never go to your high school reunion pregnant or they will think that is all you have done since you graduated.

My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.

The bad times I can handle. It's the good times that drive me crazy. When is the other shoe going going to drop?

Parenting is a negative thing. Keep your children from killing themselves, or anyone else, and hope for the best.

I got to thinking one day about all those women on the Titanic who passed up dessert at dinner that fateful night.

There is only one thing harder in this world than forgiving. It's to ask forgiveness armed only with, 'I'm sorry'.

I have always felt cookbooks were fiction and the most beautiful words in the English language were 'room service.

I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: 'Checkout Time is 18 years.'

If I had my life to live over I would have burned the pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in storage.

You become about as exciting as your food blender. The kids come in, look you in the eye, and ask if anybody's home.

When the history of guilt is written, parents who refuse their children money will be right up there in the Top Ten.

To my way of thinking, the American family started to decline when parents began to communicate with their children.

The odds of going to the store for a loaf of bread and coming out with only a loaf of bread are three billion to one.

Giving birth is little more than a set of muscular contractions granting passage of a child. Then the mother is born.

A fitting room to me has always been like a confessional ... where my body and my contrition take up the entire room.

My son did not show signs of a money deficiency until he opened his small fist in the nursery and found it was empty.

Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It's too controversial.

One certainty when you travel is the moment you arrive in a foreign country, the American dollar will fall like a stone.

Hello there. I'm out social climbing, but if you leave your name and number and if you're anybody, I'll get back to you.

With all the precautions and risks that accompany sex today, it sounds about as much fun as walking through a minefield.

My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.

The mole rat is the only rodent born without a fur coat. With a good lawyer, someone would pay for that little oversight.

When a child is locked in the bathroom with water running and he says he's doing nothing but the dog is barking, call 911.

All of us have moments in our lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.

A grandparent will help you with your buttons, your zippers, and your shoelaces and not be in any hurry for you to grow up.

Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful bit of an outburst that just comes. It's unbridled, its unplanned, it's full of suprises.

I have seen my kid struggle into the kitchen in the morning with outfits that need only one accessory: an empty gin bottle.

What makes people laugh? . . . It's a happy marriage between a person who needs to laugh and someone who's got one to give.

There is one thing I have never taught my body how to do and that is to figure out at 6 A.M. what it wants to eat at 6 P.M.

People usually survive their illnesses, but the paper work eventually does them in. Filing a claim for insurance is terminal.

You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren't dying. They're merging into big conglomerates.

Men who have a thirty-six-tele vised-football- games-a- week-habit should be declared legally dead and their estates probated.

There's something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she's only measured water in it.

As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her.

Before we sent kids to computer camps and told them they were having a good time, there was imagination among the human species.

Last year I gave seventy-four phone hours to soliciting baked goods for the Bake-A-Rama. I was named Top Call Girl by the League.

It seemed rather incongruous that in a society of super sophisticated communication, we often suffer from a shortage of listeners.

I have a friend who lives by a three-word philosophy: Seize the Moment. Just possibly, she may be the wisest woman on this planet.

Any mother with half a skull knows that when Daddy's little boy becomes Mommy's little boy, the kid is so wet he's treading water.

A member of the committee slapped a name tag over my left bosom. "What shall we name the other one?" I smiled. She was not amused.

I've always felt there are two things a woman should never do after the age of thirty-five: stand in natural light and have a baby.

Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it.

It is difficult to single out one sport over another, but if I have to name one in my separation suit, it will undoubtedly be football.

Somewhere it is written that parents who are critical of other people's children and publicly admit they can do better are asking for it.

. . . but mostly, given another shot at life, I would seize every minute - look at it and really see it - live it - and never give it back.

The hippopotamus is a vegetarian and looks like a wall. Lions who eat only red meat are sleek and slim. Are nutritionists on the wrong track?

I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.

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