“Never have more children than you have car windows.”

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

Friends are “annuals” that need seasonal nurturing to bear blossoms. Family is a “perennial” that comes up year after year, enduring the droughts of absence and neglect. There’s a place in the garden for both of them.

Every puppy should have a boy.

For years, my husband and I have advocated separate vacations. But the kids keep finding us.

When you look like your passport photo, it’s time to go home.

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

Encourage independence in your children by regularly losing them in the supermarket.

I was trampled to death by a man who believed his luggage would be the first piece off. If he were an experienced traveler, he would know that the first piece of luggage belongs to no one. It’s just a dummy suitcase to give everyone hope.

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

It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.

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

Time. It hangs heavy for the bored, eludes the busy, flies by the for young, and runs out for the aged.

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.

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.

It is my theory you can’t get rid of fat. All you can do is move it around, like furniture.

No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed.

The brain may take advice, but not the heart.

The only thing that it is advisable to know in any language is the numerals; and even there, you can do a lot with the fingers.

Advice is seldom welcome. Those who need it most, like it least.

It takes two flints to make a fire.

You don’t have to be able to lay eggs to know when one of them is rotten.

With empty hand no man can lure a hawk.

Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.

With empty hands men may no hauks lure.