What is/was your favorite "Momily"?

While my mom didn’t use this one, a friend of mine does with her nieces and nephews, “I’m cold, you need to put on a sweater.” First time I heard that I had to ask if she thought they were to dumb to know that they were cold. Yeesh.

My mom used to claim that the Beatles were the reason for the drug problem in America. I laughed the first time she said it because I was sure that she was kidding. There was only a three minute lecture but I certainly knew not to laugh again about this. Well, not in front of her anyway!

My mom would sometimes summon my little brother and I to dinner with, “Come and get it, or I’m throwing it out to the hogs!”

What made that funny, of course, was the fact that our next-door neighbors were Mitch & Ella Hogg.

September 4, 2008, 8:04 AM EDT

My Mom would ask questions with a negative in them, such as, “Do you not want to go with us?”

Yes I do want… Yes, I do not want… No, I do not want… No, I want to!

I longed for questions that a simple yes or no would answer. I still tried, and she was always crabby because she didn’t know what I meant, either.

My mom would always tell me when I was bad that she would:

“Sell me to the gypsies”

On a side note, I was staying with a friend in another state recently. He’s got a young daughter and she stubbed her toe. She started crying so he picked her up (I think she was around 4 or 5). He started to tease her that it looked pretty bad and they were probably gonna have to take the toe off (of course hoping to cheer her up). She started bawling twice as hard and just saying “I don’t want to loose my toe” over and over. I had to leave the room because my laughter was traveling up my throat faster then a drunken man’s meal.

One time, after a particularly bad day (when I had been a “terror,” at age 5, or so), my mother screamed:

“If you keep acting up, I’m gonna take you to DISNEYLAND!”

My eyes opened wide and a smile crossed my face.

She added:

“And LEAVE YOU IN THE PARKING LOT!”

September 4, 2008, 9:33 AM EDT

My mom was always going to Make My Head Swim. “If you don’t get out of that dressing room in 2 seconds I’ll grab you so hard it’ll make your head swim.”

I had a cracked rib as a child and my during a particularly frazzled time, when I complained to my mom that I it hurt when I “breathed in”, she responded “Well, don’t breathe if it hurts!”

Bill Cosby notred that his mother would often enter his and younger brother Russell’s bedroom and say, “This has got to be the WORST pigsty, I’ve ever seen!”

Bill says one of the worst beatings he ever got, was when he asked, “So WHEN did YOU become an expert on them?”

September 4, 2008, 10:03 AM EDT

Oh! I remembered another one! “If you don’t cut that out I’m gonna knock you into tomorrow!” Of course, one of my smart-aleck sisters once mumbled, “Well at least I’ll be ahead of you,” That was quite a thwap she took…

Another sister used that phrase on her son and he looked at her all bug-eyed and said, “Can you do that?” LoL!

“I’m going to send you to the moon on the end of my foot!” ....such an endearing statement…and to this day – I have NO idea why my mother would EVER have had to say that to me. I was a total, 100% angel.

(my mother should have worked for NASA because I almost made it one time!) ;0)

My mother would bribe me to do things for her…

“I will give you a cookie if you go get me _____ item.” “I will give you a cookie if you go turn ____ off.” I always did what she asked but never got the cookie. Thank goodness she never followed through with the bribe! I would be bigger than I am now!

My father would say…
“Stop that crying or I will give you something to cry about!”

“I am gonna warm your behind!”

Parents who break their promises to their kids, should be executed.

Repeatedly.

September 4, 2008, 1:02 PM EDT

I never had any from my mom. None that I could remember, anyhow. But my grandmother had plenty:

“Don’t laugh too hard or you’ll end up crying” (Something that is always at the back of my mind, tempering my joy…)

“Stop splashing in the puddles unless you want to get polio!”

“If you leave dirt under your nails, it will turn to worms and eat your fingers.”

“Don’t play in the draperies or you’ll end up with pinworms”. (This, I always imagined, was because there actually was a straight pin stuck in the dining room drapes.)

And the thing is… my grandmother was really wonderful.

When my children ask to do something that is way out of line – such as, “Mom, can I please stay up all night and see how long I can stay awake at school tomorrow?” my stock answer is “I can’t let you do that or they’ll kick me out of the Mommy Union.”

I like that, SuperMouse!

When I wanted my kids to get going from wherever we were – store, friend’s house, etc. I would say “Oh! We have to go home NOW! I have to go or I will wet my pants!” Well, that did it – they would get ready in a millisecond. Until the day my son didn’t and I said “Come on! I have to go!” and he said “I want to see you wet your pants.”

Right back at you Autumn! I am so going to start using that line! I’ll let you know how long it takes before one of the kids says he wants to see it.

Whenever I would say to my mom, “Well, all the other moms let THEIR KIDS do it!” she would pick up the phone and say, “OK, I’ll call all the other moms in our neighborhood and ask them if they let their kids do that, and if they all tell me they do, then you can, too.”

I’d then say, “Well, maybe not ALL of them…”

September 4, 2008, 6:27 PM EDT

Jack, I do that to my daughters, too!

So THAT is where my mother got that!

September 5, 2008, 12:50 AM EDT

groan