I may never know for sure, but good parenting probably involves the element of surprise.

It hit me when a friend at work brought her toddler and infant to the office for everyone to see. I asked Kim how her older son was handling the new baby.

"Badly, to tell you the truth," she said. "He just threw a fit in Target -- I'd have smacked his butt if I didn't think someone would call child protection on me. I remember I used to threaten my mom with calling child protection. She'd say, 'You better call 'em, 'cuz you're about to need some protectin'!"

See? The element of surprise! And today, Kim is a hardworking professional and a good mother in her own right. It took me back to my mother's surprises, typically enacted after weeks of repeating the same request.

One of the most frequent: Put your shoes in the closet instead of leaving them all over the house. It was understandable. Five kids, five or six pairs of shoes each, that's a lot of shoes to trip over, never mind the messy appearance. But for some reason, I couldn't get past just kicking them off wherever the urge struck me.

"I swear, if you leave your shoes out again, Heidi, I'm going to throw them into the street," she'd say.

Sure, sure, I thought. Never gonna happen.

Until one day I walked home from school, and there were my shoes, lined up along the curb in front of our house. (Mom was smart -- with five kids and one income, you can't really afford to have perfectly good shoes get run over.) Imagine my excitement of getting to pick them up in front of the neighborhood kids. Yeah, they knew my mom was crazy, but I always put away my shoes after that.

She also kept telling me to stop putting my long hair into my mouth. "It's not sanitary, and it looks terrible to other people," she'd say. "If you keep doing it, I'm going to cut it off." After a few more months of hair-sucking, I was looking in the mirror at a chic new Dorothy Hamill cut. The hair grew back, but it never saw the inside of my mouth again.

Another statement surprisingly followed through on: "Keep doing that and I'll pull this car over."

If I ever have kids, I'm definitely keeping a few of those surprises in my back pocket.

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You know how it's weird to see people outside their element sometimes? Like when you run into your hairstylist at the grocery store or your neighbor at a baseball game? You're so used to seeing certain people in certain settings that it throws you for a minute.

But nothing, absolutely nothing tops running into a male co-worker at least 20 years my senior on the beach.

This is a person my job requires me to interact with frequently. And there he was, well covered in a button-up shirt and walking shorts, enjoying his evening constitutional, and there I was, my fat hanging out of my bathing suit.

He was five feet away. There was no avoiding it.

"Uh, hey, Ron," I said, silently begging God for a sandstorm to cover me. "What are you doing here?"

"I live a few blocks away," he said.

"Oh, yeah? Out for a walk, huh?" I said. "Nice evening."

I don't think my discomfort registered a bit. He talked about his wife's business, the opportunities he'd missed to buy beach property and the best seafood joints in the area. I grabbed my chance.

"Well, all this seafood talk is making me hungry! See ya!" I said, pulling on my shorts and grabbing up my towel.

That's it. Next time I'm definitely keeping my shorts on. With my luck, my boss will come strolling along with the company's board of directors.

Heidi Hall is a former managing editor for the Southeast Missourian. She resides in St. Petersburg, Fla.