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THIS 'N THAT
An ongoing collection of amusing,
interesting, informative, and thoughtful posts
made to HOMESPUN...

posted by Simahoyo

The First Parent

Whenever your kids are out of control,
you can take comfort from the thought that even
God's omnipotence did not extend to his kids.
After creating heaven and earth,
God created Adam and Eve.
And the first thing God said to them was:
"Don't."

"Don't what?" Adam asked.

"Don't eat the forbidden fruit, said God."

"Forbidden fruit? Really? Where is it?"
Adam and Eve asked, jumping up and down excitedly.

"It's over there," said God, wondering why he
hadn't stopped after making the elephants.

A few minutes later God saw the kids having
an apple break and he was very angry.

"Didn't I tell you not to eat that fruit?" the First Parent asked.

"Uh huh," Adam replied.

"Then why DID you do it? " God asked exasperatedly.

"I dunno," Adam answered.

God's punishment was that Adam and Eve
should have children of their own.
Thus the pattern was set and it has never changed.
But there is a reassurance In this story.

If you have persistently and lovingly tried to give your children wisdom and they haven't taken it, don't be so hard on yourself.
If God had trouble handling his children, what makes you think it should be a piece of cake for you?

posted by ListHostess Shirley

"Dear IRS: I would like to cancel my subscription.
Please remove my name from your mailing list..."

~~~~~~

posted by JohnPaul

This diet is designed to help you cope with the stress that builds up during the day.

Breakfast:
1 grapefruit
1 slice whole wheat toast
8 oz. skim milk

Lunch:
4 oz. lean broiled chicken breast
l cup steamed spinach
1 cup herb tea
1 Oreo cookie

Mid-Afternoon snack:
The rest of Oreos in the package
2 pints Rocky Road ice cream, nuts, cherries and whipped cream
1 jar hot fudge sauce

Dinner:
2 loaves garlic bread
4 cans or 1 large pitcher Coke
1 large sausage, mushroom and cheese pizza
3 Snickers bars

Late Evening News:
Entire frozen Sara Lee cheesecake (eaten directly from freezer)

Rules for this Diet
1. If you eat something and no one sees you eat it, it has no calories.

2. If you drink a diet soda with a candy bar, the calories in the candy bar are canceled out by the diet soda.

3. When you eat with someone else, calories don't count if you do not eat more than they do.

4. Food used for medicinal purposes NEVER count, such as hot chocolate, brandy, toast and Sara Lee Cheesecake.

5. If you fatten up everyone else around you, then you look thinner.

6. Movie related foods do not have additional calories because they are part of the entertainment package and not part of one's personal fuel. Examples: Milk Duds, buttered popcorn, Junior Mints, Red Hots, and Tootsie Rolls.

7. Cookie pieces contain no calories. The process of breaking causes calorie leakage.

8. Things licked off knives and spoons have no calories if you are in the process of preparing something.

9. Foods that have the same color have the same number of calories. Examples are: spinach and pistachio ice cream; mushrooms and mashed potatoes.

10. Chocolate is a universal color and may be substituted for any other food color.

11. Anything consumed while standing has no calories. This is due to gravity and the density of the caloric mass.

12. Anything consumed from someone else's plate has no calories since the calories rightfully belong to the other person and will cling to his/her plate. (We ALL know how calories like to cling!)

REMEMBER: STRESSED SPELLED BACKWARDS IS DESSERTS

posted by ListHostess Shirley

Cool Fact: Emotional Robot

Q. What is unusual about Kismet the robot?

A. A robot named Kismet has the ability to show emotional responses. Researchers are developing the machine by training it in social interaction with human beings, something like the way a newborn infant learns to communicate with its mother.

Kismet has a head, with round, blue eyes, and furry eyebrows that can move two different ways. It has a mouth with red lips, which can show many different shapes. Its head and face continue to evolve and become more expressive as the designers add new features and improve the software.

Kismet is an example of the new field of "altricial robotics" - robots that "grow up," like living things, by learning how to behave through interactions with others.

More about Kismet:
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/kismet/

Some of JohnPaul's poems....

SKY-BORN MUSIC

Let me go where'er I will
I hear a sky-born music still:
It sounds from all things old,
It sounds from all things young,
From all that's fair....
Peals out a cheerful song.
It is not only in the rose,
It is not only in the bird,
Not only where the rainbow glows,
Nor in the song of woman heard,
But in the darkest, meanest things
There always, always something sings.
'Tis not in the high stars alone,
Nor in the cups of budding flowers,
Nor in the red breast's mellow tone,
Nor in the bow that smiles in showers,
But in the mud and scum of things
There always, always something sings.
....Ralph Waldo Emerson

Share some hugs today.

hugs John Paul

MAY GOD AND YOU
(prayer for your infant)

May God and you
Walk that lighted path together
and may you go through life
hand in hand forever

He'll be there as you grow
and He'll see you through the years
When you're down and low
and just can't face your fears

Always look to Him for forgiveness
and may you feel His special glow
that will light you from within
and follow you wherever you go

May you always feel His everlasting love
Through your years of young and old
until you reach those gates to Heaven
and into His embracing hold.

By Sheri Hodges(c)

BROTHERLY LOVE

Mom brought him home for me one day
In a basket of baby-blue,
I kisses his bald and wrinkled head
And whispered, "I love you."

He wasn't fun to play with then
This infant red as a beet,
For entertainment all he did
Was kick and eat and sleep.

Perhaps, I thought, we'll give him back
This brother is a drag,
He's much too young to play my games
OF junp-rope, jacks and tag.

But Mother said he's here for keeps,
I was thankful in the end;
My brother, once a childhood pest,
Is now my dearest friend.

~Unknown



THINGS THEY'LL REMEMBER:

The stories that you read to them
Before they go to bed
The comfort of your presence
While their prayers are being said

The birthday cakes with candles
For all their growing years
the sharing of their secrets
The drying of their tears

The snowman that you helped create
The visits to the zoo
Summer outings at the beach
The family barbecue

Little things that seem to go
Unnoticed and unsung
Are the things they will remember
Of the days when they were young

And the loving care that lies behind
These little things will be
A lasting recollection
And a cherished memory.

Hugs John Paul

from our ListHostess Shirley

Quotes by Erma Bombeck

One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child's name and how old he or she is.

I do not participate in any sport with ambulances at the bottom of a hill.

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

Don't confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.

Don't go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.

Dreams have but one owner at a time. That is why dreamers are lonely.

More from Erma

Spend at least one Mother's Day with your respective mothers before you decide on marriage. If a man gives his mother a gift certificate for a flu shot, dump him.

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

Making coffee has become the great compromise of the decade. It's the only thing "real" men do that doesn't seem to threaten their masculinity.
To women, it's on the same domestic entry level as putting the spring back into the toilet-tissue holder or taking a chicken out of the freezer to thaw.

I don't know why no one ever thought to paste a label on the toilet-tissue spindle giving 1-2-3 directions for replacing the tissue on it. Then everyone in the house would know what Mama knows.

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

Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop offs at tedium and counter productivity.

There's a territorial ritual to an aerobics class. I entered a class for the first time a few years ago and ended up where no one wanted to be...in the front row next to the mirror. It was three years before I could work my way to the back row.

How come anything you buy will go on sale next week?

Most women put off entertaining until the kids are grown.

I have never gone to the bathroom in my life that a small voice on the other side of the door hasn't whined, "Are you saving the bananas for anything?"

Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It's gossip.

Graduation day is tough for adults. They go to the ceremony as parents. They come home as contemporaries. After twenty-two years of child-rearing, they are unemployed.

Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery.

There is nothing more miserable in the world than to arrive in paradise and look like your passport photo.

Youngsters of the age of two and three are endowed with extraordinary strength. They can lift a dog twice their own weight and dump him into the bathtub.

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.

Why is it when you want a nice souvenir, you find a great shell in a gift shop, but some yo-yo has affixed a ten-cent thermometer to it?

Kids have little computer bodies with disks that store information. They remember who had to do the dishes the last time you had spaghetti, who lost the knob off the Tv set six years ago, who got punished for teasing the dog when he
wasn't teasing the dog and who had to wear girls boots the last time it snowed.

Who, in their infinite wisdom, decreed that Little League uniforms be white?
Certainly not a mother.

People shop for a bathing suit with more care than they do a husband or wife. The rules are the same. Look for something you'll feel comfortable wearing. Allow for room to grow.

No self-respecting mother would run out of intimidations on the eve of a major holiday.

On vacations: We hit the sunny beaches where we occupy ourselves keeping the sun off our skin, the saltwater off our bodies and the sand out of our belongings.

Mother's words of wisdom: "Answer me! Don't talk with food in your mouth!"

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

Most children's first words are "Mama" or "Daddy." Mine were, "Do I have to use my own money?"

Sometimes I can't figure designers out. It's as if they flunked human anatomy.

I remember buying a set of black plastic dishes once, after I saw an ad on television where they actually put a blowtorch to them and they emerged unscathed. Exactly one week after I bought them, one of the kids brought a dinner plate to me with a large crack in it. When I asked what happened to it, he said it hit a tree. I don't want to talk about it.

My theory on housework is, if the item doesn't multiply, smell, catch on fire or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one cares. Why should you?

Before you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they're not trying to keep up with you.

Have you any idea how many children it takes to turn off one light in the kitchen? Three. It takes one to say, "What light?" and two more to say, "I didn't turn it on."

Onion rings in the car cushions do not improve with time.

Everyone is guilty at one time or another of throwing out questions that beg to be ignored, but mothers seem to have a market on the supply. "Do you want a spanking or do you want to go to bed?" "Don't you want to save some of the
pizza for your brother?" "Wasn't there any change?"

I never leaf through a copy of National Geographic without realizing how lucky we are to live in a society where it is traditional to wear clothes.

The age of your children is a key factor in how quickly you are served in a restaurant. We once had a waiter in Canada who said, "Could I get you your check?" and we answered, "How about the menu first?"

Mothers have to remember what food each child likes or dislikes, which one is allergic to penicillin and hamster fur, who gets carsick and who isn't kidding when he stands outside the bathroom door and tells you what's going to happen if he doesn't get in right away. It's tough. If they all have the same hair color they tend to run together.

When your mother asks, "Do you want a piece of advice?" it's a mere formality. It doesn't matter if you answer yes or no. You're going to get it anyway.

No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there's a wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick.

When mothers talk about the depression of the empty nest, they're not mourning the passing of all those wet towels on the floor, or the music that numbs your teeth, or even the bottle of capless shampoo dribbling down the shower drain. They're upset because they've gone from supervisor of a child's life to a
spectator. It's like being the vice president of the United States.

Christmas Shopping: Wouldn't it be wonderful to find one gift that you didn't have to dust, that had to be used right away, that was practical, fit everyone, was personal and would be remembered for a long time? I penciled in "Gift
certificate for a flu shot."

This page was last updated June 24, 2002.