Day: May 28, 2018

As a new father and a doctor I quickly learned the true meaning of maternal instinct. Late one night, I was summoned to the hospital to attend to one of my patients. I quietly got up in the dark, but tripped over toys and crashed to the floor. As I lay there rubbing my sore leg, my wife slept on. Then there was a faint cough from the our nursery, Deborah leaped out of bed, running past me down the hall to our baby’s room. When she returned she looked at me and said, “What are you doing laying on the floor?”

* We had just moved to a lovely, quiet apartment building, but my husband and I were a little concerned to discover that the neighbors all seemed to be elderly. We wondered how they would react to our baby and our large, boisterous sheepdog. My fears were heightened one afternoon when I answered the doorbell to find a frail looking woman leaning on her cane at the front door. Assuming she had come to complain about the babies crying, I began to stammer an apology. But she lifted one hand to halt my speech and asked, “I just wanted to know if your dog could come out and play.” * We had just moved to a lovely, quiet apartment building, but my husband and I were a little concerned to discover that the neighbors all seemed to be elderly. We wondered how they would react to our baby and our large, boisterous sheepdog. My fears were heightened one afternoon when I answered the doorbell to find a frail looking woman leaning on her cane at the front door. Assuming she had come to complain about the babies crying, I began to stammer an apology. But she lifted one hand to halt my speech and asked, “I just wanted to know if your dog could come out and play.”

* Do you want a boy or girl? A friend asked our five-year-old, Ryan. During my wife’s seventh month of pregnancy. By then Ryan had heard the proverbial answer many times. “We don’t care if it is a boy or girl,” he replied, “just as long as it’s wealthy.”