Happy Thanksgiving!

Today, as we all take time to reflect on our blessings, let’s take a moment to feel gratitude for our precious little (what do you want, my love?) blessings.  Let’s be thankful for all the joy (will you stop sitting on your brother’s head, please?) they bring us, despite the sleepless nights, small aggravations (NO! No more cookies), and endless trials (do you want to go to your room, young lady?!)… because after all, if children didn’t act like, well, children, (how many times must I tell you not to climb on that?) we would never discover the capabilities we have for unconditional love, endless giving, and true refinement of character (WOULD YOU SHUT UP ALREADY?!).

Right?

So here are a few quotes to brighten your day and help us all remember how lucky and priviledged we are to be parents. And know that you are not alone in the glorious, aggravating, entertaining experience of raising children!

For Parents of Infants:

It sometimes happens, even in the best of families, that a baby is born.  This is not necessarily cause for alarm.  The important thing is to keep your wits about you and borrow some money.  ~Elinor Goulding Smith

A baby is an angel whose wings decrease as his legs increase.  ~Author Unknown

Families with babies and families without babies are sorry for each other.  ~Ed Howe

People who say they sleep like a baby usually don’t have one.  ~Leo J. Burke

Getting down on all fours and imitating a rhinoceros stops babies from crying.  (Put an empty cigarette pack on your nose for a horn and make loud “snort” noises.)  I don’t know why parents don’t do this more often.  Usually it makes the kid laugh.  Sometimes it sends him into shock.  Either way it quiets him down.  If you’re a parent, acting like a rhino has another advantage.  Keep it up until the kid is a teenager and he definitely won’t have his friends hanging around your house all the time.  ~P.J. O’Rourke

One of the most obvious results of having a baby around the house is to turn two good people into complete idiots who probably wouldn’t have been much worse than mere imbeciles without it.  ~Georges Courteline, La Philosophie de Georges Courteline

A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.  ~Carl Sandburg

For parents of Small Children:

A characteristic of the normal child is he doesn’t act that way very often.  ~Author Unknown

Children need love, especially when they do not deserve it.  ~Harold Hulbert

Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.  ~Rabindranath Tagore

A child is a curly dimpled lunatic.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

A three year old child is a being who gets almost as much fun out of a fifty-six dollar set of swings as it does out of finding a small green worm.  ~Bill Vaughan

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is a home without children?  Quiet.  ~Henny Youngman

It is not easy to be crafty and winsome at the same time, and few accomplish it after the age of six.  ~John W. Gardner and Francesca Gardner Reese

Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing up is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.  ~Phyllis Diller

If there were no schools to take the children away from home part of the time, the insane asylums would be filled with mothers.  ~Edgar W. Howe

There are no seven wonders of the world in the eyes of a child.  There are seven million.  ~Walt Streightiff

For Parents of  Teenagers

The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time.  They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.  ~Quentin Crisp

Little children, headache; big children, heartache.  ~Italian Proverb

Heredity is what sets the parents of a teenager wondering about each other.  ~Laurence J. Peter

The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.  ~Dorothy Parker

Adolescence is perhaps nature’s way of preparing parents to welcome the empty nest.  ~Karen Savage and Patricia Adams, The Good Stepmother

Mother Nature is providential.  She gives us twelve years to develop a love for our children before turning them into teenagers.  ~William Galvin

The best substitute for experience is being sixteen.  ~Raymond Duncan

The invention of the teenager was a mistake.  Once you identify a period of life in which people get to stay out late but don’t have to pay taxes – naturally, no one wants to live any other way.  ~Judith Martin

Teenagers complain there’s nothing to do, then stay out all night doing it.  ~Bob Phillips

There isn’t a child who hasn’t gone out into the brave new world who eventually doesn’t return to the old homestead carrying a bundle of dirty clothes.  ~Art Buchwald

At fourteen you don’t need sickness or death for tragedy.  ~Jessamyn West

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around.  But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.  ~Mark Twain, “Old Times on the Mississippi” Atlantic Monthly, 1874

All quotes from The quote garden

image from UC Davis

Happy Thanksgiving!