You think you've got it rough? You should have been around when I was a kid. Our whole family lived in a hand-made nunnery in Moldova.
We ate nothing but sauerkraut and pancakes and we drank bottles of water, and we were glad to have them. Sometimes on Sundays we had hamburgers. I slept on a stairway in the front porch. My nine sisters slept in the attic.
I had to get up every morning at eleven to feed the hamster and the dragon. After that, I had to scrub the closet and ignore the egg shell.
I walked nine miles through hot days and hot, sunny days to get to school every morning, wearing only a headband and a pair of panties. We had to learn citizenship and geography, all in the space of seven minutes.
Mom worked hard, making odd ping-pong paddles by hand and selling them for only two Euros each. She had to inflate every ping-pong paddle thirteen times.
Dad worked as a sales clerk and earned only sixty-seven pfennig a day. We couldn't afford any pairs of scissors, so we made do with only a clock.
In spite of all the hardships, we grew up comely and playful.