Daaang. I thought she had a heart attack while eating a sandwich. Thats what started the rumor she choked on one.
and
The swimming one is one of those universal applied parental rules.
My family now says it was invented to give parents a 1/2 tea or coffee break from their lifeguard duties after eating but when I was a kid I hated that one. I know alot of more protective parents who worry about cramping/drowning. I have 2 water rats so my only rules are if you’re gonna puke, aim for the patio and if you’re gonna drown, yell.
My maternal Grandmother (who’s primary advice to my Mom and secondary advice could pass the 20,000 character limit for a thread with ease. She (oddly/cruely?) answered her daughter’s “where do babies come from?” query with: watermelon pits. For years my mother was a very cautious watermelon eater.
My fave quote from her still (and one I enjoy using) is her retort to a snotty kid who uses So.
Example:
Nana: Johnny, if you don’t wait to digest before swimming, you’ll get cramps.
Johnny: So…
Nana: Sew your ass. It’s got a big crack in it.
From Dear Old Dad (d 1986) circa 1974 (I graduated H.S. in '76)
“Just remember, these are the best years of your life!”
Was the man trying to get me to take a voluntary dirt nap, or what???
A couple years ago the same thing happened to me. The price of Nvidia stock was around $18-$20 each share. The price of each share got as high as almost $80 each about 4 months later. sigh
My old worldish abuela who raised me used to tell me that all the reading I did would make me crazy.
Oh wait, you said incorrect.
Hmmm . . . my Dad was (and still is) full of wisdom. Examples:
-
Always run a bar of soap over a new zipper. It will never stick.
-
If you polish a new pair of shoes the moment you get home, they’ll be easier to polish later on.
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Leaving the front door open will NEVER heat (or cool down) the outdoors.
-
“This isn’t so bad - I remember when I was a kid, I used to have to walk to school and back in the snow, uphill both ways, with cardboard in my shoes because they had holes, and a couple of potatoes that we threw in the stove the night before in our pockets to keep our hands warm because we didn’t have gloves, and we had to eat them for lunch because we couldn’t afford anything else!”
(Point of fact - He was saying this long before Cosby used it - and, the potato thingie really works! An ex-girlfriend and I went antiquing once in the middle of a New England blizzard - we went for lunch, and neither of us ate the baked potatoes. I scooped them up, put them in my coat pocket, and they actually kept my hands toasty warm while I waited for her to poke around some of the outdoor displays at the shoppes)
Of course, my Mother had (and still has) more practical advice:
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Don’t run with that stick in your hand - you’ll poke your eye out
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Stop playing with those scissors - you’ll poke your eye out
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Don’t sit so close to the TV - you’ll need glasses
(Interestingly enough, she never told me not to play with myself, because I’d go blind!)
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If you do that, and break your legs, don’t come running home to me because I warned you
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Always wear clean underwear because you never know when you’ll get hit by a car and have to go to the hospital
The really sad part is, once in a while, I had used one or two of these with my kids - and I can’t wait until my kids start using them on my grandchildren!!!
Oh, and from Mom “Never eat anything with mayonnaise in it that wasn’t prepared at home.”
Of course, I realize this is a holdover from the times when an ice box really was an ice box like Alice and Ralph Kramden used. I’ve tried to reason with her that the combination of modern refrigeration techniques and the high turnover of foods in a busy deli mean that mayo isn’t any more dangerous than anything else you’d be apt to pick up at said deli, but you just can’t argue effectively with Mom, can you?
That’s a chestnut! Please extend my thanks to your Mom and ask her if she’d mind me borrowing it.
Dad: Don’t flip the light switch on and off. It wastes five minutes of electricity whenever you flip a switch.
Mom: When you get an erection it will point towards the girl you like.
The hell? What is it, Stiffy? What is it, boy? No panties at 7 o’clock? Roger!
Always wear a tinfoil hat. You never know when you’re being monitored.
This goes under a catagory of simply weird:
Said to me by the Feminine Gestation Gulag I escaped from after she found out that I was in the process of joining the Navy when I was 17:
“Better to masturbate than sleep with a whore.”
shudder
It was the first time I ever heard her say the word masturbate and the first time I heard her say whore. The next time she said whore was when she called me one when I was 22.
She was a goooooooooooooooooooood Mommy.
(My vision disqualified me for service. C’est la vie.)
“Don’t read in the dark, you’ll ruin your eyes.”
Both of my parents wore glasses when they were considerably younger than I am now. I do not. Good thing I didn’t listen to them.
Mom, paraphrased: Logic and critical thinking are so cold and heartless. Quit trying to analyze everything with logic, it’s so cold and emotionless.
My mother will never know that I’m on these message boards, ever.
Mom: Coffee will stunt your growth.
It’s a good thing I started drinking coffee when I was 13. Otherwise I’d be ten feet tall now instead of 6’2".
“I’m bored.”
“Well why don’t you go take a nap?”
:rolleyes:
Don’t marry.
Or marry someone with whom you can share chores
Whenever my wife and I went through a period of economic drought early in our marriage, my mother in law’s advice to her was always the same:
“Sell all your furniture.”
Well, we never did sell the cheap, used, busted-up furniture we could afford at the time (see “economic drought”) and we got through those times OK, but I always have wondered what the heck she was thinking …
Oh, and seconds about hearing that “Coffee will stunt your growth” (I’m 6’4" tall, good thing if it did, it’s hard enough finding clothes that fit as it is) and “Always wear clean underwear in case you have an accident and ride in an ambulance.” (Now, if I’m injured badly enough to have to ride in an ambulance and have my clothes stripped off me, I imagine all the BLOOD will hide any embarassing stains.)
From my first mother in law:
“why on earth do you want to go to college? You’re just going to have to quit your job when you have the kids.”
If I hadn’t been so stunned, I probably would have hurt her. Which would have saved me 8 years.
When I was being bullied in elementary school, I told my mom about it and asked her what to do. The answer was “kill them with kindness.”
Kill them with kindness. Riiiiiiiiiiight. Because those kids were only picking on me because I hadn’t been nice enough to them. Why couldn’t she have just told me the opposite? It would have worked so much better.
And just a couple of weeks ago, when I retreated from my desert town for the summer and brought my plants with me, she advised me to put them out on the backyard fence in full sunlight. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I went ahead and did it. They were fried in less than a day.
Other than that, though, she’s a completely wonderful person and almost always makes some sort of sense.
Plus which, the staff is kind of preoccupied with saving your life and all that.
I’ve posted this before, but I’ll just tell it again: once when I was in an ER, the guy in the next cubicle had been brought in from a motorcycle accident. I could hear him through the curtain, apologizing to the female RNs for his lack of any underwear. One of them said, “No prob; I’ll just put this towel over you.”