'I'm not beautiful, I'm pretty!' (Angrily at age 2 and a half. After getting into his sister's toy makeup case and being called beautiful...)

'Daddy, how many whoppers are there in those tall trees?' After waking up in the car while driving through Calaveras Big Trees and hearing daddy say, 'Wow, that's a whopper of a tree.'

Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put us in an impossible situation.

'Divorce is when mommy and daddy yell at each other then they spread apart. Then they put up a 'for sale' sign in front of the house and they spread farther and farther apart until they can't come back ever again and it's very sad.' (teaching her 4-year old brother)

'Families are about love overcoming emotional torture.'