Dear Kid,

I hope you don’t ever have a long hospital stay. But if you do have to spend any amount of time in the hospital, please understand that it is important to leave before you get too used to being there.

Here are 21 things you should never stay in the hospital long enough to do.

1. Learn to like hospital food.
2. Celebrate more than one major holiday.
3. Write the Great American Novel.
4. Read and comment on all of Shakespeare’s plays. Including the obscure ones.
5. Learn the names of the nurses who fill in when the regular nurses are on vacation.
6. Become proficient in Jell-O stacking.
7. Knit a sweater. For Hagrid.
8. Knit an afghan for one of the nurse’s babies.
9. Memorize the hospital meal rotation.
10. Be invited to a doctor’s retirement party.
11. Earn a hospital designation like “The Patient We’ve Kept the Longest.”
12. Be written up in the American Medical Association Journal as “an interesting case.”
13. Become proficient with an arc welder (yeah, that idea is still cracking me up).
14. Learn how to drink hot coffee through a straw.
15. Figure out how to smuggle in good coffee and chocolate.
16. Launch a line of makeup suited for hospital lighting.
17. Earn “frequent patient” platinum status.
18. Be invited to join a hospital committee as the patient representative.
19. Outgrow your pedicure.
20. Outgrow your hospital gown.
21. Turn into “that patient I was telling you about.”

Love, Mom