15 minutes talk time per day Get enough minutes for everyone on your plan. If you have more than three people on same plan, you should avoid 300 and 500 minute plans. Assuming you have free nights and weekends, a 300 minute plan works out to 15 minutes of talk time per day. This is certainly not a good deal, even for two people. Unless you like to pay outrageous per minute fees, get as many minutes as you can afford.

Text Away Teenagers love text messaging. So do cell phone companies since it costs about 10 cents to send out a message and .2 cents to receive one. If you have teenagers, consider a plan that includes unlimited text messaging and internet access. If this is not available you can also get a cell phone that is not internet ready so they can’t go online even if they wanted to. The same applies to camera phones, enhanced phones and anything else that can end up costing you at end of month.

Growing up is never easy. Just ask Little Lady, almost three-and-a-half, how hard it is. She’ll tell you. “It’s really, really hard. Half way through day, my parents are a complete wreck.”

She’s right. Sometimes tension in here gets so thick you could almost slice it with a turbo-jet, 9,000 horsepower chainsaw. Almost.

Like other day when we were leading Little Lady upstairs to go to bed. She decided that stairs were perfect place to spring a surprise “balance” exam. So she pushed me to see if I would fall down stairs, and maybe even knock my wife down along way.

“Hey! Don’t push me down stairs.”

Obviously, I was missing point of surprise exam. She pushed again.

“Don’t do that!” I almost shouted.

After two attempts, you would think I would be given an A+, but she pushed again.

I got fierce. “What part of ‘Don’t push me down stairs!’ don’t you understand?”

“The ‘don’t’ part,” my wife interjected. “She understands rest all too well.”

Everybody has a different parenting style, and I am no-one to belittle others who raise their children differently. But I believe most effective parenting style is don’t-cry-over-spilt-milk approach.

“Little Lady, where is your sippy cup?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it in living room?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it here? No. What about here? No. Is it…ah, here it is and it’s empty. Good girl, you drank it all.”

“No, I just put it there.”

“Where’s milk?”

“Maybe in carpet.”

In addition to assorted juices, milk and water that our voracious green carpet has sneaked from Little Lady’s sippy cup, there is matter Little Sister’s milk bottle.

Did you know that if you tip it just right and apply optimum pressure, you can empty an entire baby bottle into a carpet? At one year old (almost), Little Sister has already mastered technique. Next week I’ll be filling in early enrollment forms for engineering school.