Early one morning before I even opened my eyes, I noticed a strange aroma. I finally opened one eye and standing there looking me right in the eye, was my two year old daughter staring at me. She had red stuff all over her hands and pajamas. It was LIPSTICK!!! I told my wife, "Get up, your daughter has made a mess." She took one look and said, "You get up, she is your daughter !"

        Well I could tell I wasn't going to win that argument and with the help of a swift kick from my wife I crawled out of bed. I stumbled into the kids bedroom and almost fainted. There in her crib stood our ten month old daughter and her face and hands were completely covered with red lipstick! When I started trying to clean that stuff off of her I discovered that even her eyelids were completely covered with lipstick. I asked eldest daughter, "How in the hell did you get lipstick on her eyelids?" She said, "I told her to close her eyes!"

        By the time we got both of them clean (took several hours) their skin was raw and I was seriously considering a vasectomy. Sometime not much later our two year old got into the habit of getting up early in the morning and going next door to visit the neighbors. This was not good, but even worse she had stripped off her night clothes and was going in the nude! I had a daddy-to-daughter talk with her and told her she shouldn't go outside without anything on.

        A few mornings later along about daybreak I heard a "clop clop", "clop clop" noise out in front of the house. I looked out the window. There was eldest daughter and she wasn't nude. She wasn't nude because she was wearing my cowboy boots (only)!

        About five years later my youngest daughter had a tonsillectomy and talked the doctor into giving her the tonsils in a jar. One day my wife's best friend was sitting in a chair in the living room when youngest daughter said, "Francis, you are sitting on my tonsils!" Francis came up out of that chair faster than a speeding bullet and almost fainted when she saw the jar full of tonsils. From then on Francis was very careful to inspect a chair before she sat down.

        One time we went to a nice restaurant that had been converted from a real old house. They apparently had foregone conversion of the bathrooms however. To flush the commode you pulled on a chain attached to a water tank several feet above the commode. Well, wife and daughters made a trip to the ladies room and after my turn just as I was sitting back down at our table one of the loudmouth daughters said, "Daddy, did you pull the chain?" Everybody in the restaurant just roared.

        When they were in high school my wife would take them to school every morning and even watch them go indoors. Then one morning about two hours after she had dropped them off she received a phone call at her work place. "Your daughters are not in school today. Are they sick?" Wife went into the panic mode and called me and I went into panic mode too. We decided to meet at our house before we called the police. We got home at the same time and rushed into the house to find our daughters along with some of their friends having a grand old time busy baking cookies!

        Kids shore do make life interesting!!!