# Familie

"All seek perfection from our parents … Just wait till your parents start depending on you, that is when your own perfection, or lack thereof, will be apparent."

"Emotional intelligence begins to develop in the earliest years. All the small exchanges children have with their parents, teachers, and with each other carry emotional messages."

"My sisters and I sit together on a pair of suitcases. If we've forgotten anything, it's already too late -- our rooms have all been sealed and photographed. Anyway, Tatiana would say it's bad luck to return for something you've forgotten."

"My sister learned she was a carrier for a recessive disease, Bloom syndrome, late in one of her pregnancies. I remember the panicked call and the weeks of worry as she and her husband awaited his test results; if he was also a carrier, this meant their daughter had a one in four chance of being born with the disorder."

"A parentologist is a person who writes a book about parenting that is very clear about answers to, 'How am I supposed to raise my child?' Some of these well-intentioned people may be a bit too sure-footed on the sometimes slippery slope of parenting."

"With each day that our huge ship was on the ocean, my sense of being further and further away from my loved ones, my home, and my environment grew stronger."

"I want to safeguard the value of lunch. For me, it is sacred. My family and I always have lunch and dinner together. And we always sit down. Food does not taste the same if you are standing up!"

"I have a 6-year-old niece who doesn't look like the majority of girls on the covers of magazines. I hope that by the time she's 16, the world will have changed."

"My father was a trained accountant, a BCom from Sydenham College and a self-taught violinist. In the 1920s, when he was in his teens, he heard a great violinist, Jascha Heifetz, and he was so inspired listening to him that he bought himself a violin, and with a little help from an Italian teacher, he learned to play it."