I got to thinking one day about all those women on the Titanic who passed up dessert at dinner that fateful night.

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

The bad times I can handle. It's the good times that drive me crazy. When is the other shoe going going to drop?

I originate from a family where sauce is viewed as a refreshment.

My son would walk to the refrigerator-freezer and fling both doors open and stand there until the hairs in his nose iced up. After surveying $200 worth of food in varying shapes and forms, he would declare loudly, 'There's nothing to eat!'

For the first two years of a child's life, we spend every waking hour tryibg to get the child to communicate. Then we spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out how we can reverse the process.

The family. We are a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms. . . and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.