My sister, Paula, and her husband, Chris, had just finished tucking their young ones into bed one evening when they heard crying coming from the children's room.
Rushing in, they found Tommy crying hysterically.
He had accidentally swallowed a 5p piece and was sure he was going to die.
No amount of talking could change his mind.
Trying to calm him, Chris palmed a 5p coin that he happened to have in his pocket and pretended to remove it from Tommy's ear.
Tommy, naturally, was delighted. In a flash, he snatched it from his father's hand, swallowed it and demanded cheerfully - 'Do it again, Dad!'
Police Officer Bryant found a perfect hiding place for watching for over speeding motorists.
One day, the officer was amazed when everyone was under the speed limit,
so Bryant investigated and found the problem.
10 year old Dennis was standing on the side of the road with a huge hand painted sign which said "Radar Trap Ahead."
A little more investigative work led the officer to the boy's accomplice, another boy about 100 yards beyond the radar trap with a sign reading "Tips" and a bucket at his feet, full of change.
Nowhere will you find more truth and humor than the innocence of a child... Read what some children have said when approached with unique situations.
While I sat in the reception area of my doctor's office, a woman rolled an elderly man in a wheelchair into the room. As she went to the receptionist's desk, the man sat there, alone and silent.
Just as I was thinking I should make small talk with him, a little boy slipped off his mother's lap and walked over to the wheelchair. Placing his hand on the man's, he said, "I know how you feel. My mom makes me ride in the stroller too."
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As I was nursing my baby, my cousin's six-year-old daughter, Krissy, came into the room. Never having seen anyone breast feed before, she was intrigued and full of all kinds of questions about what I was doing.
After mulling over my answers, she remarked, "My mom has some of those, but I don't think she knows how to use them."
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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."
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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!"
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On the way back from a Cub Scout meeting, my grandson innocently said to my
son, "Dad, I know babies come from mommies' tummies, but how do they get there in the first place?"
After my son hemmed and hawed awhile, my grandson finally spoke up in disgust, "You don't have to make up something, Dad. It's okay if you don't know the answer."
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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?"
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Paul Newman founded the 'Hole in the Wall Gang Camp' for children stricken
with cancer, AIDS, and blood diseases. One afternoon, he and is wife, Joanne
Woodward, stopped by to have lunch with the kids.
A counselor at a nearby table, suspecting the young patients wouldn't know
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?"
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Until a child tells you what they are thinking, we can't even begin to imagine how their mind is working...
Little Zachary was doing very badly in math.
His parents had tried everything... tutors, mentors, flash cards, special learning centers. In short, everything they could think of to help with his math.
Finally, in a last ditch effort, they took Zachary down and enrolled him with the local Catholic school. After the first day, little Zachary came home with a very serious look on his face. He didn't even kiss his mother hello. Instead, he went straight to his room and started studying.
Books and papers were spread out all over the room and little Zachary was hard at work. His mother was amazed. She called him down to dinner.
To her shock, the minute he was done, he marched back to his room without a word, and in no time, he was back hitting the books as hard as before.
This went on for some time, day after day, while the mother tried to understand what made all the difference.
Finally, little Zachary brought home his report Card. He quietly laid it on the table, went up to his room and hit the books. With great trepidation, his Mom looked at it and to her great surprise, Little Zachary got an 'A' in math.
She could no longer hold her curiosity. She went to his room and said, "Son, this is great! What was it? What helped you so much? Was it the nuns?"
Little Zachary looked at her and shook his head, no.
"Well, then," she replied, "Was it the books, the discipline, the structure, the uniforms? WHAT WAS IT?"
Little Zachary looked at her and said, 'Well, on the first day of school when I saw that guy nailed to the plus sign, I knew they weren't fooling around."
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The more people to whom you share, the more your friends will know you care.
A teacher gave her class of 11 year olds an assignment: Get their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end of it.
The next day the kids came back and one by one began to tell their stories.
Ashley said, "My father's a farmer and we have a lot of egg laying chicks. One time we were taking our eggs to market in a basket on the front seat of the car when we hit a big bump in the road and all the eggs went flying and broke and made a mess."
"What's the moral of the story?" asked the teacher.
"Don't put all of your eggs in one basket!"
"Very good," said the teacher.
Next little Sarah raised her hand and said, "Our family are farmers too. But we raise chicks for the meat market. One day we had a dozen eggs, but when they hatched we only got ten live chicks, and the moral to this story is, "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched."
"That was a fine story Sarah. Billy, do you have a story to share?"
"Yes. My dad told me this story about my Auntie M... Auntie M was a flight engineer on a plane in the Gulf War and her plane got shot down. She had to bail out over enemy territory and all she had was a bottle of rum, a machine gun and a machete.
She drank the rum on the way down so it wouldn't break and then she landed right in the middle of 100 enemy troops. She killed seventy of them with the machine gun until she ran out of bullets. Then she killed twenty more with the machete until the blade broke. And then she killed the last ten with her bare hands."
Good Heavens," said the horrified teacher, "what kind of Moral did your father tell you from that horrible story?"
"Stay away from Auntie M when she's been drinking."
