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I got this email from my cousin today, and as Arsenio Hall used to say…”Things that make you go, hmmmm.”

To all the kids who survived the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s…

First, we survived being born to mothers who drank and/or smoked during pregnancy.

They took aspirin, ate bleu cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and never got tested for diabetes.

Then, after that trauma, we were put down to sleep on our tummies in cribs brightly covered with lead based paint.

We had no child proof lids on medicine bottles, no locks on doors and cabinets, and when we rode our bikes we wore baseball hats instead of helmets.

As infants and children, we would ride n cars with no car seats, no booster seats, no seatbelts, no airbags, bald tires, and sometimes no brakes.

Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank from the garden hose, not from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink, between four friends, from one bottle and no one actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, white bread, REAL butter and bacon, we drank Kool-aid made with real white sugar, and we weren’t overweight…WHY?

Because we were always outside playing… that’s why!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were home before the streetlights came on.

We would spend hours building go carts and bike ramps out of scraps.

We did not have Playstations, Gamecubes, and X-Boxes. There were no video games, 150 cable channels, no DVD’s, or CD’s, or surround sound. No cell phones, personal computers, internet, or chat rooms.

WE HAD FRIENDS… and we went outside and found them.

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

We got spankings with wooden spoons, branches, belts, ping pong paddles, or just a bare hand and no one would call CPS to report abuse.

We ate worms and mud pies made from real dirt and the worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, did not put out many eyeballs.

Little League had try outs and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment…Imagine that!

The idea of our parents bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

These generations have produced some of the best risk takers, problem solvers, and inventors ever.

The past fifty years has been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

We had freedom, failure, success, and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

If YOU are one of THESE kids…Congratulations!

You may want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as one of these kids, and while you’re at it, forward it to your own kids so that they will know just how lucky (and brave) their parents were.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with a pair of scissors, doesn’t it?

Thank You Father God for this precious new life and, just as with the four that came before him, I ask that You protect him all the days of his life. I pray that those days and years are numerous, joyful, happy and healthy. I beg You, in the name of Your own precious Son, Jesus, keep them all safe, protected from all harm whether it be physical, mental, emotional, and especially spiritual.

I look at them, and am in awe of Your wondrous plan, that you would even find me worthy to be entrusted with the lives of these five children, Your children, loaned to me for but a time. Please give me the patience and wisdom, even in the midst of daily chaos, to remember that my time here, that our time here, is so temporary. That I must shine brightly, and with all my might, in order to help guide them along their individual paths toward You, so that when our brief time here is over, I will still have the honor of knowing them in Heaven.

Thank You, thank You, thank You Father for letting me feel the wonder of  life, five times, growing inside of me, and for the ability to feed each of them with my own body. What a miraculous creation You envisioned when You designed the woman’s body. I am so grateful to have been blessed with the experience.

In Jesus name…Amen