Weird stuff our parents or grandparents said or believed (girlfriend, boyfriend, Christmas)
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My mother told us every time we sighed, it would take a whole day off our lives. She doesn't remember saying it, lol, but the moment is clearly etched in my memory and still bothers me!
My college roommate believed if you sat on concrete, or the ground, when it was cold you would get a cold in your bladder. Her elderly parents told her that and she believed it.
Omg. Yes! I remember as a young adult, telling my mother I had a bladder infection. She shook her head and said, "I keep telling you to wear slippers in the house...."
This reminds me of the story of a girl who noticed every time her mom cooked meatloaf, she always cut the front & back piece off before putting it in the oven.
So the girl asked her mom why she always did that. Her mom said, "I don't know. My mother always did that so that's how I do it."
Confused, the girl then went to her grandma and asked HER why she always cut the front & back pieces off meatloaf before cooking it. And Grandma said, "I don't know but it's how my mother did it."
By this time, the girl was really frustrated & anxious to get to the bottom of this "mystery". So she went to her great-grandmother and asked HER why she always cut the front & back pieces off meatloaf before cooking it.
Great-grandma simple answer was " My oven was too small to fit a whole meatloaf. So I had to cut off part of the meat so the rest could fit in my oven."
(I hope I told that story right. *smile*)
I heard the same story but it was about a ham. A meatloaf you could shape however you want to fit in any pan.
My cousin-in-law- she would only use cold water to start boiling for pasta, and would get very upset if you tried to tell her using hot water would get it to boiling faster. I have no idea why.
most water authorities treat hot water with chemicals (chlorine ?) to kill algea that breads in warm moist places.
Which is why you're not supposed to have pillows in the crib. Also why you don't put them on their stomachs to sleep until they are older. SIDS risk. Even though they say parents are in revolt of that theory.
Not really a red flag but it HAS happened according to urban legend-ish reports.
Of course, as a pet sitter I would NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS let a cat in a baby crib. They just left their dirty litter pan, for goodness sakes! UGH. Not to mention all that hair and dander.
It's also likely that in 1924 the baby was in a small cradle probably on the floor; not a big crib. My mother was in a CIGAR box as a preemie.
My grandmother was born at home in 1900, weighing a little over three pounds. They kept her wrapped in wool batting in a warm oven. I guess that was the nearest thing to an incubator you could get back then. She lived into her 80's.
My dad- "All men are after is only one thing, so don't give it to them" (this didn't scar me or anything or make me afraid of men for awhile during adolescence)
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Oh, I forgot about that one. My grandmother's advice to me as a teenager, warning me that men don't marry girls they've had sex with: "Why should a man pay for a cow when the milk is free?"
My grandmother believed using a tampon was like packing a wound to stop the bleeding. She had had numerous late term miscarriages where she had to be "packed" to stop the hemorrhaging. She happened to go through menopause earlier than most women and her mind she associated this with the miscarriages and the wound packing. People of her generation were so ignorant of their own bodies.
She raised my sister and I and while she told us about menstruation, she never talked about sex AT ALL. It was for married people and a woman was supposed to just put up with sex for the sake of her husband and for procreation and that was it. I was 13 or 14 years old and heard my aunt, who had just had a baby talking to my grandmother about the stitches being itchy. I assumed she was talking about the stitches to open her up to take the baby out because how else could it get out, that's how clueless I was.
My aunt was born at home during a snowstorm in 1934. My grandfather walked out into the storm to get the doctor, stopping first to send over a nurse who lived nearby.
The baby came before the doctor got there. She was born with what they used to call "the caul", the amniotic sac over her face. Such babies were supposed to have powers to tell the future, and the nurse was afraid and wouldn't touch her. By the time the doctor got there and removed the membrane, my aunt had been deprived of oxygen. She had cerebral palsy and was also mentally challenged, with the intelligence of about a five-year-old. It completely changed this family's life. There were no services for mentally retarded kids back then except that the school sent over a tutor who taught her the alphabet and how to write her name in her palsied scrawl.
She could walk until she was 9, when polio came through and she caught it and had 30 seizures in one night. Everything the family had or did centered around my aunt and her disabilities. She lived to be 61 years old, doomed to most of her life spent in a hospital bed listening to music, all because of some nurse's stupid superstition.
That is so sad. Quite a lot of suffering.
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