Cheaper by the Dozen: Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, Chapters 10–14

She claimed to be an expert in combatting cold weather and in avoiding head colds. Her secret prophylaxis was a white bag, filled and saturated with camphor, which she kept hidden in her bosom.

Grandma averred she was a great believer in "spare the rod and spoil the child.”

Then she would swing the twig with a vigor which belied her years.

The result of the moving picture was that the surgeons involved managed to reduce their ether time by fifteen per cent.

Then growing indignant: "Do you mean to tell me you knocked my little girl unconscious for no reason at all?”

Mother had urged Dad to call a taxi. She didn’t know how to drive, and she said Dad probably wouldn’t feel like doing the driving on the way home. But Dad laughed at her qualms.

She and the driver helped a crumpled mass of moaning blue serge to alight.

After what had seemed an interminable time, Dad had come out into the waiting room again, and reached for his hat and coat.

We spent our summers at Nantucket, Massachusetts, where Dad bought two lighthouses, which had been abandoned by the government, and a ramshackle cottage, which looked as if it had been abandoned by Coxey’s Army.

She had bled considerably on a rug, while Dad tried to fashion a tourniquet and roared inquiries about whether there was a doctor in the house.

Later, when the automobile ban was lifted, we’d take the car with us on the Gay Head or the Sankaty, the steamers which plied between the mainland and the island.

He also believed that cleanliness was next to godliness, and as a result all of us had to go swimming at least once a day. The rule was never waived, even when the temperature dropped to the fifties, and a cold, gray rain was falling.

Mother’s swims consisted of testing the water with the tip of a black bathing shoe, wading cautiously out to her knees, making some tentative dabs in the water with her hands, splashing a few drops on her shoulders, and, finally, in a moment of supreme courage, pinching her nose and squatting down until the water reached her chest.

"You don’t want to show the white feather in front of all the kids.”
"I don’t care if I show the whole albatross,” Mother said.

A lazy man, Dad believed, always makes the best use of his Therbligs because he is too indolent to waste motions.

Dad acquired the Rena to reward us for learning to swim. She was a catboat, twenty feet long and almost as wide. She was docile, dignified, and ancient.

It is doubtful if, outside the Naval Academy at Annapolis, any group of Americans ever received a more thorough indoctrination before setting foot on a catboat.

Dad, sitting in a chair and holding a walking stick as if it were a tiller, would bark out orders while maneuvering his imaginary craft around a tricky harbor.

He’d ease the handle of the cane over toward the imaginary leeward rail, and two of us would haul in an imaginary rope.

"Now we’ll come up and pick up our mooring. You do that at the end of every sail. Good sailors always make the mooring on the first try. Landlubbers sometimes have to go around three or four times before they can catch it.”

From the moment he climbed into our dory to row out to Rena’s mooring, his personality changed.

Dad’s mood was contagious, and soon the mates were as dogmatic and as full of invective as he, when dealing with the sneaking pickpockets and rum-palsied derelicts who were their subordinates.

Dad’s mood was contagious, and soon the mates were as dogmatic and as full of invective as he, when dealing with the sneaking pickpockets and rum-palsied derelicts who were their subordinates.

Through the years, old Rena remained phlegmatic, paying no apparent attention to the bedlam which had intruded into her twilight years.

The boom caught him on the side of the head with a terrific clout, a blow hard enough to lift him off his feet and tumble him, stomach first, into the water.

They had just boarded a train at Oakland, California, after the ceremony, and Mother was trying to appear blasé, as if she had been married for years.

He put Anne’s bassinet on a desk in his and Mother’s bedroom, and talked to her as if she were an adult, about concrete, and his new houseboat, and efficiency, and all the little sisters she was going to have.

"Of course she can’t hang on, the way you and her mother coddle her and repress all her natural instincts. Show the nurse how you can hang on, Anne, baby.”

"I knew you had a strange collection of beaux during your college days, but which one was Robert? I don’t believe I remember your mentioning him. Was he the one whose picture you had with the blazer and mandolin? Or was he the one your sisters told me about who stuttered?”

There was considerable partisanship among the family as to the desired sex of the next baby. The boys wanted to remain in the majority; the girls wanted to tie the count at six-all.

His hair was smoothed to perfection, his canvas shoes a chaste white, and he looked sporty in his linen knickers, his belted coat with a boutonniere of Queen Anne’s Lace, and his ribbed, knee-length hose.

His hair was smoothed to perfection, his canvas shoes a chaste white, and he looked sporty in his linen knickers, his belted coat with a boutonniere of Queen Anne’s Lace, and his ribbed, knee-length hose.

When Mr. Coggin departed after the unfortunate debacle concerning our tonsils, a series of other professional cameramen came and went.

He seemed to have a special affinity for flashlight powder, and the bigger the flash the more he enjoyed it.

It would be stretching a point to say they had developed any real confidence in Dad’s indoor photography. But at least they had adopted a fatalistic attitude that death, if it came, would be swift and painless.

Now then, everybody pick up the shovels and heave in the sand. Look serious. This is a sad burial. The good are often interred with their bones.

"There sat Mrs. Gilbreth, surrounded by her brood, reading aloud a fairy tale,” Dad would read.

"The oldest, almost debutante Anne, wants to be a professional violinist. Ernestine intends to be a painter, Martha and Frank to follow in their father’s footsteps.”

A flush of crimson crept modestly to her cheeks, and she made a depreciating moue.

Here Dad would stop long enough to give his version of a depreciating moue, and hide his face coyly behind an upraised elbow.