Sympathy on roomie issues. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when I got a studio and lived by myself. I'd been through the ones who didn't do their dishes, the one who cut up tomatoes on the counter and left me the mess, the one who ate all my peanut butter, the one who used my bath towel. I grew tired of being the only person who bought toilet paper and took to hiding a personal stash in my room. They limped along for awhile with stolen paper napkins from McDonald's, but eventually caved and bought some freaking TP.

I remember when my Dad bought a new car in 1964, the most important thing in the world to me was that it had seat belts in the back for us kids. I can hardly believe those used to be optional.

This makes me laugh because that's exactly how I was as a kid. I think my mother often feared that she'd created a monster.

t looks sidelong at kwistin

aaaaaanyway...

One of my friends went Super Crazy Religious on us as children. When she was about ten she gave us lectures for swearing and sang extra loud in church and wanted to know why Presbyterians didn't speak in tongues.

She got over it.

why didn't they have that baby in Dallas with them?

TOTALLY!!!! Hell, they could even have brought the nanny along. It's also a wee bit horrifying that the baby was taken to the ER 6 days after it happened. Good lord. Poor little guy.

My mother tells the story of how, when I was very young (five? four?) I was riding in the car, managed to unlatch the door, and was dragged a few feet while clinging to the door handle. Yup - before seatbelts were common, much less standard.

I was talking with the mother of a three-year-old recently, and she said that her daughter's preschool had had some sort of presentation on smoking, and the three-year-old came home saying, "Those cigarettes are going to kill you." Her mother said, "I wish they would have warned me somehow."

When I was in second grade, after we had the "smoking will kill you" talk, one of my friends went home and threw away all her parents' cigarettes, because she didn't want her parents to die.

I still try and get Mom to quit smoking, I try to limit the times I talk to her about smoking to twice a year, but it's really hard to watch her smoking knowing her father died from cancer and emphazema. (which I totally misspelled).

There's a big Disney themed billboard near my house with a kid and the Fairy Godmother and the slogan "The Magic Number is 4' 9" " which is how tall a kid needs to be to not use some kind of booster seat. I was talking to my cousin (the pedetrician) about it this weekend and he said that he's going to make his kids wear seatbelts well over the limit, he explained that seatbelts sit about kids' hips and over their spleen and liver.

Florida tried to get a mandatory seat belt law for a long time and before Ted Bundy was excuted there were bumper stickers saying "I'll buckle up when Bundy does!"

My parents used to have drinks every evening (my father worked for Seagrams, for crying out loud - not a job for someone who didn't drink!). Once my school health book had a story about children of alcoholics who were living in a slum with roaches and rats crawling over everything. There was something about the children crawling out on a ledge (to escape a fire?). I was horrified and went home that afternoon and asked my mother, with tears in my eyes, if she and my father were alcoholics.

Last Minute Mary here...

Parents who have child care (day care or such) - were you able to write it off this year? TurboTax is telling me I can't.

Parents who have child care (day care or such) - were you able to write it off this year? TurboTax is telling me I can't.

Yeah, and my place even had our tax form ready.