Show your manners to pregnant ladies

[frazzled]

14. I tried to teach this to my kids when they were young ...

Both my daughter and my son: open a door for an older person (don't just go rushing through before them), offer your seat to a senior or pregnant woman, etc. Though they didn't ride buses or trains much when they were young, unless we were traveling (we didn't live in a public-transit kind of city at the time), I tried to reinforce it when we spent a month in Paris once: I showed them the signs on the Metro in each car, in which seats were reserved for "femmes enceintes" (pregnant women) and "mutilés de guerre" (war wounded).

I'm not sure my efforts paid off that much: our society has simply abandoned these common sense rules of deference to those in need of extra assistance. I felt like I need to remind them all the time, because they didn't even seem to notice.

I was in New York recently and on a crowded bus. I got one of the last available seats and my feet were absolutely killing me. We hadn't gone a few blocks, however, before an elderly lady got on, so I squeezed out and told her she could have my seat. As I moved back to stand with the other (somewhat incredulous) passengers, I just mumbled, "Well, I was just glad there was someone older than me on the bus!"