OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES

Supposedly true stories about kids:

Out bicycling one day with my eight-year-old granddaughter, Carolyn, I got a little wistful. “In ten years,” I said, “you'll want to be with your friends and you won't go walking, biking, and swimming with me like you do now”. Carolyn shrugged. “In ten years you'll be too old to do all those things anyway”.

Working as a pediatric nurse, I had the difficult assignment of giving immunization shots to children. One day I entered the examining room to give four-year-old Lizzie her needle. “No, no, no!” she screamed. “Lizzie”, scolded her mother, “that's not polite behavior”. With that, the girl yelled even louder, “No, thank you! No, thank you”!

On the way back from a Cub Scout meeting, my grandson asked my son the question. “Dad, I know that babies come from mommies' tummies, but how do they get there in the first place?” he asked innocently. After my son hemmed and hawed a while, my grandson finally spoke up in disgust. “You don't have to make something up, Dad. It's OK if you don't know the answer”.

Just before I was deployed to Iraq, I sat my eight-year-old son down and broke the news to him. “I'm going to be away for a long time,” I told him. “I'm going to Iraq”. “Why?” he asked, “Don't you know there's a war going on over there”?*

Paul Newman founded the “Hole in the Wall Gang Camp” for children stricken with cancer, AIDS, and blood diseases. One afternoon he and his wife, Joanne Woodward, stopped by to have lunch with the kids. A counselor at a nearby table, suspecting the young patients wouldn't know that Newman was a famous movie star, explained, “That's the man who made this camp possible. Maybe you've seen his picture on his salad dressing bottle”? Blank stares. “Well, you've probably seen his face on his lemonade carton”? An eight-year-old girl perked up. “How long was he missing”?