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Show We Log a lot of Miles and Headaches in Raising a Family PAROWAN - I'm still writing and scratching out 1979 on all my checks and changing it to 1980. 1 guess I don't want to face the fact that another year has passed. When your baby starts talking about what college he wants to go to, and reminding you to buy razor blades, you begin to realize that you've logged a lot of miles and milestones on the paths of parenthood. Going back a few years, some of these milestones stand out very clearly in my mind. What an occasion it was hen the last baby in the family finally decided to sleep clear , through the night. Of course, he was six at the time. Then with each one the Red Letter Day when they finally tell you "need go potty" (usually in a loud voice in church), but you could then joyfully ' " discontinue being one of the 7 1 biggest investors in the -pampers company or Lux soap corporation. Next comes the "I can dress myself phase". Socks go on upside down, shoes on wrong feet and shirts and pants on backwards. It takes anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half and you had ten minutes to get to an appointment. This is also the age where they want to choose what to wear so you have to hide all the fancy stuff or that's what they will put on. This reverses as they get older. With teenage boys you try to hide the torn levis and T-shirts. You can't pry them into the nice clothes. With the "dressing myself" phase comes the "I can fix my own hair" problem. We didn't know our youngest daughter had eyes until she was sixteen. She insisted on wearing her bangs just about to the middle of her nose. Now she looks at her old pictures and mumbles at me for allowing her to wear it that way. Oh how quickly they forget ail the wonderful advice we gave them. A very traumatic milestone for mothers is the day they send their little angel to school for the first time. It was awful, she was three minutes late coming out of the building and I was sure she'd been kidnapped. Another very trying time begins when they trade in their dolls and tonka trucks for lip gloss, pimple cream, and each other. You just get girls raised to the age where they are really superior trained baby sitters and they don't have any time for such mundane activities and the boys who were so willing to run all sorts of errands in the car (before) they were old enough to get a driver's license just don't seem to have time after they are legal drivers. Another one of the most traumatic milestones is when they first take the car out alone at night. I remember the kid left the house at 7:00 and at 8:30 I was pacing the floor, sure that he had wrecked in the canyon and no one had found him. I don't know if I can face the time when they all get married and leave home. That would just ave me and the old man here alone, we've never been able to finish a sentence at the dinner table for 30 years. I don't think we can communicate com-municate without interruptions, in-terruptions, besides now I've forgotten what we were trying to talk about. by Mary Gae Evans |