The Redneck Guide to Raisin' Children Read Online Free PDF Page A

town—and we advise you to do likewise.
    â€¢ Go around looking at cemetery plots for sale. Tell your kids it’s never too early to start planning for the future.
    â€¢ Take your children to the dog show at the county fair. (And hope your oldest girl doesn’t win Best of Show.)
    â€¢ Drive out by the main highway and watch the kudzu swallow up a tree.
    â€¢ Take your family to a tractor pull and pull for the smallest tractor.
    Don’t feel guilty about neglecting housework to take your kids on an outing. As Aunt Alma says, “Sometimes you’ve got to take time to stop and smell the urinals.”
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    Rednecks’ Five Favorite Actors
    1. Chuck Norris (action)
    2. Willie Nelson (singin’ movies)
    3. Fess Parker (historical)
    4. John Wayne (war movies)
    5. Ned Beatty (romance)
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Keeping Your Kids Safe
    We live in a dangerous world these days, and you’ve got to watch your kids every minute or you’ll start losing them right and left.
    Here are some precautions you should take:
    â€¢ Install safety belts in the bed of your pickup truck. They’ll keep the young’uns from flying off into the bushes every time you hit a pothole.
    Nothing’s more aggravating than having to turn around and go back looking for your kids. And the ones you don’t find will bug you even more late that night by banging on the door for you to let ’em in.
    Why can’t kids be like dogs? You put a dog in the back of a pickup and he’ll never fall out. You can swerve around a curve at ninety miles per hour, and when you look in the rearview mirror your dog will still be there—peeking around the side of the cab with his tongue flapping in the wind and holding up a little sign that says Faster! Faster!
    We’ve never figured out how dogs can hang on when they ain’t even got fingers. They must have some magical powers that scientists still don’t know about.
    That, or else dogs are a whole lot smarter than kids but hide it from you so they can get a free ride through life.
    â€¢ Before your offspring start riding in your truck, show them how to open and close the bed gate without cutting their hands on the rusted spots.
    And don’t let them sit close to the brown primer—it’ll rub off on their good clothes.
    Learning to open the bed gate is extremely important. Over in Potato Ridge a truck plunged into a river and three men riding in the back drowned, Nobody’d ever taught them how to open the gate and they couldn’t get out.
    â€¢ Teach each child how to dial 911 on your rotary phone. If you don’t know how to do it yourself, flag down the county constable and get him to show you.
    If you ain’t got a phone, tell the kids just to holler at the top of their lungs in case of an emergency. A neighbor will think somebody’s being murdered at your house and will call the police for them.
    â€¢ Buy all your girls a big purse so they can carry a tire tool inside at all times.
    A heavy iron tire tool is the only handheld weapon that’s got more stopping power than a .44 magnum pistol. And it leaves a distinctive head dent that makes it easy for the cops to identify an attacker.
    But your girls should be careful about carrying their protection to class, because they could get in trouble. In some redneck areas across the United States, schools have installed sophisticated tire-tool/lug-wrench detectors.
    â€¢ Make your kids memorize your street address. If they get lost, they’ll know exactly where they live.
    And when you move, take the house numbers with you so you’ll have the same address.
    â€¢ Drive your son a ways out in the country, dump him off, and see if he can find his way home. If he makes it back, you’ll never have to worry about losing him. If he doesn’t … well, the boy must not have been too bright to begin with. (Rufus calls this the “process of natural selection.”)
    That might