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.

You can't deduct the whole thing, but there's a tax credit for it. There's a whole section for special stuff like that (moving expenses, etc.) in TurboTax.

After the fact Mary, here.

If you got a check from your auto insurance, is that "Income" that needs to be declared?

The H&R Block guy didn't ask us specifically about an insurance pay-out (the car was totaled), and we mentioned in the course of tax prep that our car had been totaled and we bought a new car (because we itemize, and if the sales tax had been significant enough, we could have claimed it, but it wasn't, so we didn't).

We thought of it after we received confirmation that the state had received and processed our returns. We'll file an amended return if we have to (and should be able to pay any tax we owe, thanks to the refund), but I hate the thought of doing it.

It's IRS form 2441 if TurboTax won't do it for you. I think it might impact the child tax credit, but we had Section 125 for preschool so we had our deduction that way. I got some tax software in the mail for free (I think it was TaxCut rather than TurboTax), but I'm so used to doing it with PDF forms and a Spreadsheet that I don't want to use the Tax software.