Why I'm Still Afraid of Flunking First Grade at 50

Well, sometimes my oldest sister would watch us three younger sisters. My mom would give us four dolls and a stack of saltine crackers for a snack. She would of course decide when it was time to feed us. We would all sit there like baby robins in a nest with our mouths open waiting for her to drop something in our mouths – so she would ask if we wanted the cracker with or without salt. If we wanted it without salt she would take a cracker and lick the salt off and then hand it to us. It took the meaning of sodium free to a whole new level.

The 7-up Slurpee that we all shared... Well, that is why I have emotional backwash to this day.

How many of your remember when jelly came in those little Flintstone glasses? The neat thing was when you were done with the jelly – then you could wash the little glass jar and then use it at the table as a glass – if you ate enough jelly you could furnish a whole set -- even Martha Stewart hadn't thought of that. One day I accidentally broke one – and one of my older sisters said, "How come can't we keep anything nice around here?"

I love being the youngest in the family but some people don't like their birth order. The problem? The problem is all those books out there about birth order. And all of us believe it and live by it as though it were all true.

Well, I say if you don't like your order in the family why not change it so you end up where really want to be?

How can that be done? Well, what do you do if you didn't like your first, middle or last name? You'd go to court and have it changed. Want to be first born? The youngest? Disappear in the middle? Go on the Web, find a site created by lawyers to change your birth order, download the forms, and voila! You're now top of the heap and can run the universe. Or, if you're now the baby of the family you can stomp your feet, get big alligator tears and threaten to go tell Mom and Dad even if you are 38.

To change your birth order you might try telling people the hospital got the ink footprints mixed up and actually you were born a decade before your oldest sister who looks nine years older than you. You can then go over to your (former) oldest sister's home, knock on her door, and shout, "Give me back my make-up purse! Who said you could borrow it in the first place? And don't let me ever find you in my bathroom again!"

Or, finally, to change your birth order go to HighSchoolReunion.com and use Photoshop to insert your own picture into the class of '86 where your brother's face used to be. The amazing result? Suddenly, you're now Wally Cleaver and he's the Beaver. Even Ward and June are too old to go ape over something like that.

Finally, remember birth order begins to repeat itself in large families with every fourth child. This is mainly because no birth order book has more than four types of children so then by the fifth one the child starts acting like the first one. If someone could think of another chapter it would likely transform families overnight.

Birth order, according to some authors, affects everything about your life. It affects whether or not you have asthma, what type of exercise program you should undertake and whether the leaves turn in your front yard turn to autumn colors before or after others in your family.

Basically if you know about birth order, you don't need to know anything else. And why should you?

You already have a brother who knows everything for you.