We didn't have a curfew when we were teenagers. My parents just said, "Be home at a reasonable hour." There was little doubt that they knew we knew what "reasonable" meant. On the few occasions I tested the limits of "reasonable," I understood exactly what I was doing, got the response I thought I might get, and quickly learned that breaking their trust in this area was simply not worth the effort. Add a comment

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"Sho-ee Bert, I'm hot as a hen a layin'."

My mother occasionally used this expression to describe herself on hot, sticky summer day. I don't know if this saying is peculiar to the Ozarks region, but it always caused us to laugh. Just how hot, after all, does a hen become when laying an egg? Whatever it is, I'm confident that when this condition is reached by a human, he or she needs to quickly consider ways to cool off.  As one who grew up on a farm with 2000 chickens, I know a "hot hen" must be taken seriously. Add a comment

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Dr. Baker will be taking a "summer break" from writing the next few weeks. Here is one of our favorites from a few years ago celebrating the wisdom of her father.

Rarely one to be discouraged about any undertaking, my father was fond of saying, “That’s no hill for a stepper.” I believe the first time I heard him say this I was about 12 or 13 and we were hiking in the Rockies, but thereafter I know he repeated it on a number of other occasions as well. In fact, it was a frequent theme. No matter what the challenge, he figured that if you kept putting one foot in front of the other (or didn’t give up on solving the problem), you could accomplish a lot more than you ever thought possible.

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I asked my husband what I should write about this week.

"Make hay while the sun shines,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I responded. “

You know,” he answered, “even if you don’t want to do something, if you have a good opportunity, you should still do it, because, later on, you might not be able to do it.”

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Ask my brother and sister. They’ll tell you. As a child, I was terrified of storms. It all started around the time I watched The Wizard of Oz at about the age of six. Not long after that, I became aware that tornados were real and they could blow away your house. Over time I became rather obsessed with the thought, reading newspaper articles about tornados and how many people died or were injured, listening to weather updates on television and the radio, and anxiously scanning the skies when storm clouds gathered. In rather short order my fear generalized to fearing the sound of the wind, which was quite unfortunate given that we lived in a large, old farm house that rattled and clattered with even a modest breeze. On windy nights I had great difficulty sleeping, even though few storm clouds were in sight.

Read more: What to Do When Your Child is Afraid