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The Slice: Look both ways before you lecture

Here’s a tale of a long-suffering preschooler who thinks supervision can be overdone.

“My 4-year-old granddaughter had been drilled and grilled for weeks about crossing the street all by herself,” wrote Jan Myhre. “On her first foray she returned from the neighbors 45 minutes later and announced, ‘Well, I’m back and I didn’t die!’”

Rival performers: Katherine and Eric Phillips recently attended a musical program that included their 9-year-old daughter Elke’s dance recital.

At one point during this event, a young man sang “When Irish Eyes are Smiling.”

When Elke’s mom later complimented the young man’s voice, Elke pooh-poohed his performance. “Oh, he wasn’t really singing,” she said. “They lip-snitched it.”

She probably meant “lip-synced,” but Elke’s mom noted that it was, in fact, actual singing. Not lip-snitched.

Dodgeball, continued: “The most important lesson I learned from dodgeball was that my 9th grade PE teacher was the president of the Male Chauvinist Pig Society,” wrote Shannon Hensley. “Having been smacked in the face one too many times with a deflated volleyball ball, I flat refused to play the game. The first time I refused, the teacher said to me, ‘But you’ve got to play! You need to learn to be able to dodge when your husband hits you.’”

Hensley informed him that her future husband wasn’t going to hit her.

The gym teacher argued that there was no way she could know that.

And Hensley said, yes, there was.

“What kind of a jerk says anything like that to a 15-year-old girl?”

Slice answer: It has been a few years since she had occasion to use this. But when someone asked Sue Jones if he or she could hold one of her then-infant daughters and Jones didn’t think it was a good idea, she would say this.

“Sure, you may hold her. But I have to tell you she just had a major blow-out in her diaper and our family rule is that the last one to touch her has to change her.”

Today’s Slice question: What percentage of Spokane area women have never had a bodice ripped?

Write The Slice at P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. Name the greenest state in the land of the free.

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