1. Always wear clean underwear. Until I became a parent, I though this lesson was unnecessary. Then Junior came along and I realized that you are not born with clean underwear habits, you develop them after a lifetime of having your mother nag you about it. I can only hope that I am as successful as my mother, who has never had to rush to the hospital after one of us has been in a car accident and hear the dreaded words, "We could have saved your daughter, but she wasn't wearing clean underwear."

2. Don't put a tattoo on anything that will sag or grow wider in the future. Yes, my mother really did give my sisters and I this advice. And yes, all of us took it very seriously except my younger sister who has a really noticeable tattoo on an area of her body that has seen some serious expansion in the past. Fortunately, thanks to the South Beach Diet, her tattoo is now a normal size.

3. Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you. My sisters and I took this to mean "if your sister punches you in the face, you can punch her in the face, too." Mom didn't see it that way. In fact, she actually thought she was telling us to be nice to each other. Sheesh. Who wants to be nice to their siblings? This is the main reason I only have one child. Well, that and rising college tuition costs.

4. Never go to a nude beach without sunscreen. My mother gave this advice only once - after my cousin, Danny, snuck out to Santa Cruz and was sunburned in what my mother termed "an unfortunate place." To my knowledge, none of us have ever used this advice. Well, OK, I personally have never had to use it - but I'm fairly certain my tattooed sister has.

5. Collect all the bugs you want just don't put them in your pocket. When I was a kid, I wondered about this one. I mean, what was so special about a pocket that you couldn't keep a cool bug in it? Then I became a mother. And I learned the hard way that the whole point of this advice was to keep mothers from being surprised by a pocket full of spiders while doing laundry.

6. Stop making that face or it'll freeze that way. OK, I admit it. Sitting in the back of my parent's station wagon on long road trips to places we girls didn't want to visit, my sisters and I would practice being annoying little brats by spending the entire trip making faces at each other. And our faces never froze. But we were always a little nervous when we made the pig faces. I mean, who wants to go through life with a frozen face and fingers permanently stuck up their nose?

7. If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. Once, I went for an entire week without speaking to my sister. And the great part was, I could blame it all on my mom.

So there you have them - words of wisdom from my mom - and please remember this final bit of advice: if your friends jump off a cliff, don't follow them! Be the leader!

At least, I think that's what she said. It was hard to tell since the novocaine hadn't worn off.

Laurie Sontag Laurie Sontag is a Gilroy writer and mom who wishes parenthood had come with a how-to-guide. Her columns are syndicated. You can contact her at Laurie@lauriesontag.com.