Another Day Older ...

If you happen to be friends with me on Facebook, you may have noticed a few people leaving messages on my timeline yesterday. That would be because I matured a little more yesterday. I'm a little older than a half a century now, and since someone who's fifty-one years old ought to have a little wisdom, I thought I'd share some with you. Here's a few gems I've gleaned over the last half century.

1. No one ever died of humiliation. Believe me, I've tried.

2. If you don't eat well and exercise right, you won't have the body of a twenty year old when you're in your fifties.

3. Even if you do eat well and exercise right, you still won't have the body of a twenty year old. You're fifty for pete's sake!

4. Have all your kids at once and get them grown and out of the house all at the same time. Otherwise your older children will continually point out any and all areas where your parenting styles (re: discipline, rules) have changed over the years.

5. When your adult children do point out your parenting flaws, you can respond with, "I know I made mistakes. But evidently God thought you could handle it, otherwise He wouldn't have made me your parent."

6. Children will always try to guilt you into and out of things. The trick is to heap a much bigger load of guilt back on them. For instance:  "You never let me do that at their age" should be answered with, "You put me through twelve hours of labor and a c-section. You didn't deserve to do that at their age."

7. It's okay to admit that you don't know everything. Everyone else figured that out about you a long time ago.

8. Get to know and use modern technology. Otherwise you won't be able to communicate with your children and grandchildren who do all their talking with tweets, emojis and hashtags.

9. Invest in a good beauty routine. There will come a day when you can no longer skip makeup because you're just running a few errands. You'll know when that day comes because everyone you encounter will ask if you've been sick or will tell you that you look tired.

10. Eventually you'll have some aches and pains that can't be worked out with a little stretching. Keep it to yourself. No one wants to hear your organ recital.

11. If you have to ask, "Does this look too young for me?" Then it probably does.

12. You may not know everything, but you ought to know more than you did last week or last month or last year. When you stop learning new things, you grow stale. And boring. And irrelevant.

13. Stop procrastinating. You're not getting any younger!

You'll also learn that not everything ties up neatly, and sometimes your lists don't end with even numbers.

Now it's your turn. What have you learned that you didn't know when you were younger?