Let My Kid be a Kid, Dammit!

While I’m pretty easygoing about a lot of things, anyone who has read my blog for a while knows I have a few, uh, issues that consistently raise my hackles. One of them is how the world has no regard for the fact that I am raising a CHILD. A child that I want to REMAIN a child for a little longer. I mean she’s barely six, for chrissakes. I’m not ready for her to to be assimilated into the hypermature world of slutty celebrities, hoochie skank clothing at Limited, Too (which, incidentally, is owned by Victoria’s Secret) and oral sex in the back of the school bus. I want her to have a childhood. Is that SO MUCH to ask???

I’m not 100% sure if I’m premenstrual or what but feeling like a raw nerve on a windy day has made today a little difficult. Things are really…pissing me off. More than they should. But I think I was well within my rights to get angry today and the store manager on duty at my local Publix grocery store agreed.

It all started in the hated snacks aisle. I mean the snacks are fine. It’s the magazine rack across from the snacks that always bothers me. Maybe it’s just me, but strolling down the aisle having my daughter at eye level with FHM, Lowrider, Maxim and other publications of that ilk really pisses me off. This is a grocery store, not Barnes & Noble or Borders. This is a place where people and their children shop day in and day out. I just feel like I shouldn’t have to worry about crap like that. I reiterate…she’s not quite six years old. Does she really need to be exposed to what basically amounts to softcore porn at the GROCERY STORE???? It just seems like there was a time when people cared that something might be inappropriate for children but seriously, nobody gives a shit anymore and if you’re raising kids, girls in particular, and you’re not in a coma, you know it’s true.

Not only are girls conditioned to believe that being a human toothpick will make them better, more desirable people (eating disorder anyone?), but they’re also being conditioned to believe that their worth is in their body and sexuality and this saddens me in addition to really chafing my ass because it’s the absolute antithesis of everything I want for her. And today was the day I (and my PMS) decided I’d had enough.

While walking down the snack aisle and trying, as usual, to get my daughter to focus on the junk food instead of the sleazy magazines, I took note of this (it wasn’t this exact cover but one similar) and I just lost it. I grabbed a copy, rolled it up, stuck it down in the cart where TQ couldn’t see it and stormed up to the service desk. I asked for a manager and tried to remain calm while I waited. A woman manager emerged from the office and a torrent of words came rushing out of my mouth as I held up the magazine for her to see.

I basically said that I was sick and tired of dealing with this and how am I supposed to explain this kind of stuff to my 5 yr old and why should I have to when all I want to do is grocery shop and who generates more revenue in this store? Families with children or the random guys who stand around and read magazines?

She said she was going to show the magazines to the head honcho manager and relay my complaints and I was sure to ask her to ask him for me how he would feel for his wife and kids to have to shop with that shit right in their faces. The manager agreed wholeheartedly and dispatched someone to remove all the magazines. I didn’t expect or ask her to remove the magazines. I just wanted my voice to be heard. But still, that small victory felt good and frankly, I don’t know why I waited so long. I hope they follow through and do the right thing and that this wasn’t just lip service because I don’t intend to forget about this. (And Publix should take note that Wild Oats is just as close to my house and doesn’t stock that kind of stuff)

And if my daughter ever sounds like this, I’ll probably just throw in the towel and step in front of a bus.

“But when we go out, we do everything together - drinking, dancing, going to the bathroom, even vomiting.”

WTF?

˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚

7/17/2006 EDITED TO ADD:

I feel I should clarify for anyone who should happen along that I do not advocate censorship but with the power to create media comes a responsibility. To just send it out into the world with no regard for who is on the receiving end is socially irresponsible. Yes, you have the RIGHT to put anything out there that you want but stores and publishers need to realize that whether the law mandates it or not, they have a responsibility to society.

The law is sympathetic to the right to free speech but in practice, there are so many other considerations and though I hardly expect corporations to give a crap about those considerations, I also cannot see the harm in taking some voluntary responsibility for what is and isn’t appropriate for younger eyes when they choose what to openly display in their stores.

It’s not about denying anyone their right to non-kid friendly material. You can have it. I don’t care. But when it comes to young kids, I have to draw a line.

It may be hard to imagine but I used to not see the world this way. When I had no kids, the world, to me, was an adult place and everyone should just adapt to our adult preferences. But as a parent, I realize that an adult-centric view of the world simply doesn’t work. Adults arent the only inhabitants of the universe and thus they shouldn’t be the sole centers of it any more than children should be. We’re all in it together…

The Vacation Postmortem

Hi all! I’m back and boy am I glad to be home. Kick back and put your feet up a while and I will tell you stories of injury, death (sad but true), stolen sustenance, my introduction to P’s very fussy doppelganger and more.

(In the interest of not turning this into a narrative of my entire vacation, which could easily take hours to write, I’m going to do bulletpoints)

• We arrived around noon to our apartment-style beach rental and I was unpacking our stuff when I noticed P had something in his mouth. Normally I can say, “What’s in your mouth? Let me see” and he’ll open his mouth and show me or even put it in my hand sometimes if it’s a non-food item. But this time he clamped his mouth closed and wouldn’t even let me peek. I squeezed his cheeks a little so he would open up and he did…just as he gulped down the mystery item. I swear I caught a glimpse of something pinkish and shiny — like a PENNY! I’ve heard of kids eating pennies and as I recalled, the prescription was for the parent to look through their poop to make sure it comes out. So I tell Hubz about P’s possible ingestion of coinage and he doesn’t hesitate to announce that HE will NOT be digging through any poopy diapers looking for a penny that may or may not have been eaten because if it’s in there, it will come out eventually. Somehow, his lazy man-logic doesn’t put me at ease so guess who has been squishing through turds all week looking for a damned penny? I’ll give you a hint. It’s not Hubz. (and because I can read your mind, let me just add that I’m using a double layer of wipes to do the search)
• Shortly after the penny incident, I’m changing P’s diaper on our bed, which has the bedspread folded down with the top sheet exposed (because hotel bedspreads are rarely washed and have been found in studies to be covered in a multitude of different bodily fluids…yick!) when P, butt-naked, decides to scamper away, giggling and clearly wanting me to chase him to the other end of the kind size bed. Because I cannot resist the cuteness, I give chase across the bed only to discover it’s wet. And slightly yellow. It seems Mr. Funtime Baby had not only absconded from the diaper change but he peed on the sheets, as well. Yay. And while I pondered the implications of this for a couple seconds, P seized the opportunity to dive off the side of the bed and landed on his forehead with one of those sickening thuds you hate to hear. He was okay after a lengthy crying jag but the bruise on his forehead screams “Call the authorities immediately.” And of course, since all of my in-laws haven’t seen P in a while, he will naturally end up having some kind of thing on his face for when we meet up with them and of course, it will be forever immortalized in every vacation photo. It happens every time…I swear to God. (We’ve been there for an hour. An HOUR and we’ve already had two “incidents” so I’m hoping I’ve reached our quota for the remainder of the week. I mean statistically, the odds are in our favor, right?)
• The second morning we are there, my niece tells everyone there are police all over the beach a couple hotels down. She goes down there to see what the deal is and comes back with some grim news. A young man, a teenager, has shot himself in the very early morning hours and has apparently been in his beach chair ever since. The tide came in and surrounded him with water and still nobody noticed him for hours. This haunts me for the rest of the trip and is still on my mind even now.
• We only wanted to stay for part of the week at the beach and my MIL & FIL only wanted to say part of the week so we decided to take over their place mid-week. This was a win-win for all and we were happy with the arrangement. The night before the trip, I went grocery shopping because our place has a kitchen and obviously, we will need stuff to eat. Because I don’t adore cooking, especially in a teeny kitchen that is not MY teeny kitchen, I buy a half pound of Boars Head turkey and a quarter pound of Boars Head baby swiss cheese, salivating at the thought of eating delicious turkey & swiss sandwiches for lunch after mornings of frolicking with my kids on the beach. Well…come our second day there, I go to make us one of the aforementioned sandwiches and uh…the turkey and swiss are gone. As in NOT THERE anymore. I search the fridge and notice that a lot of my in-laws things are still there, like the FIVE pounds of Canadian bacon from Sams Club and the pre-packaged Plumrose ham that I wouldn’t eat if my life depended on it. But the turkey and swiss that we desperately wanted to eat had vanished. They took it. Accidentally, I’m sure. But they took my lunch. And the huz and I are both supremely irritated about it and make endless remarks about the lunch that we will not get to eat because we really don’t have any other lunch kind of stuff. Incidentally, our provisions were returned to us upon arriving home (substantially lighter, I might add) but Boars Head turkey does not keep for 6 days and so I give it to the stray cat that hangs around outside my house. Grrrrrrr…
• P was super clingy and fussy the whole time and I don’t know why. I suppose it could have been a touch of stranger/separation anxiety but being the ONLY person your baby wants can be exhausting and annoying. I had ALL these people wanting to help with him and he wouldn’t have it. So NOT FAIR…
• My husband’s family is really nice. They are all seriously wonderful people. But…just like my family, they have very poor attention spans. I find almost nothing as annoying as starting to answer someone’s question only to have their attention diverted by some other blabbermouth before I have a sentence completed. I know this is an ego thing and if I were a more enlightened being it wouldn’t bother me but I really don’t care. I think it’s rude.
• The good news is my allergies didn’t bother me the whole time I was at the beach. The bad news? They kicked right back in as soon as I got home. It would seem that I’m allergic to something here in my house, which really sucks.
• I only mentioned the more notable parts but all in all, it was a pleasant and really fun, albeit exhausting, vacation. I think TQ had more fun than anyone. Every evening she played on the beach with her cousins and other kids while the sun set and even I got out there and played freeze tag and frisbee with them. One night my BIL produced a box of sparklers and throngs of kids came around to get one and put them in the huge sandcastle TQ and her cousin built that day. She said it was “the best day ever” and there must have been some truth to it because it felt magical to me, as well.

To everyone who dropped by and kept my bloggy company in my absence…THANK YOU! When you go out of town, rest assured that I will do the same for you :)

(And no, I’ve not yet found the penny)

A Tale of Two Balls Rides Again

When my husband and I bought our first house, I kept noticing this weird smell around the toilet in the master bathroom. It was vaguely familiar but I couldn’t quite place it. Until one day when I realized the smell was that of sweaty balls. Yes. You read correctly. The toilet had one of those plasticky toilet seats and we had intended to change it but hadn’t done it yet. And THAT was where the smelly, sweaty balls smell was coming from.The guy we bought the house from, Ted, was a real cocksmacking shithead bastard old-ass motherfucker. As you may have deduced, I didn’t care for him very much. This man, whom I loathed and who made me insanely angry SO many times while trying to buy this stupid house, had managed to stick it to us one last time with his nasty balls.

But what I really wanted to know is HOW the smell was on the toilet seat. I asked my husband if his balls touch all over the toilet seat, either inside or on it or whatever and he looked at me like WTF? Of course not.

But clearly Ted of the smelly balls was doing SOMETHING to have left his stink all over the toilet seat. What I also want to know is how his kindly wife Regina put up with it. Didn’t SHE notice the stinky sweaty balls smell? Clearly, for his ball smell to have permeated the plastic toilet seat, it had to have been BAD.

If your man had balls that smelled that bad, wouldn’t you be concerned? At the very least, wouldn’t you have bleached the holy hell out of your cheap piece-of-shit plastic toilet seat every day? If it was me, I would have bleached Ted’s balls every day, too. Suffice it to say, we went and got a new toilet seat the instant we realized the source of THE SMELL.

Incidentally, after a few months of living in the new house, a check arrived for Ted from the IRS, in an amount very close to the amount of money he had screwed us out of (did I mention that he royally shafted us, in addition to subjecting us to THE SMELL?). It was some kind of refund for overpayment. Instead of forwarding it to him, we ripped it up into tiny pieces and ceremoniously flushed it down the now infamous master bathroom toilet.

Yes. Bad karma. I know. It was worth it. My only true regret is that he probably never even knew about it.

˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚
This has been an encore presentation from the archives as I’m still on vacation. I hope you enjoyed it. I’ve been reading blogs but on a 24000 bps modem connection, it’s sooo slow so I’m not able to comment or else I’d be on the computer forever and that would be a shame because the weather has been absolutely beautiful!

Miss you all! Wish you were here :)

Fat Tummy Redux

I’m currently on vacation but not wanting to leave my poor blog to languish with an old post *gasp* I’ve taken the liberty of digging up a few things from my early days of blogging because, as I like to say, it’s a shame to waste a perfectly good post

˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚

My stepmom recently left a copy of US magazine at my house. While I usually reserve my celebrity catch-up reading for the doctor’s office, I was very compelled to read about how celeb moms are under such pressure to lose their baby weight and of course, all about their personal dramas of postpartum weight loss.

Hah! There was NO drama to be found. Nothing but personal trainers and low-carb ZonePerfect meals being delivered each day. Hmmmph.

I exercise almost every day and I have not lost a single pound in 4 months. I breastfeed (and bottle feed) a voracious 6 month old but no weight loss for me. I keep asking everyone about that devious rumor that breastfeeding helps you lose your baby weight (it didn’t work with my first baby either) but my research yields nothing concrete. My doctor, however, has confirmed that many women don’t lose any weight until they stop breastfeeding. He advises me to enjoy this time and not sweat a measly 15 lbs.

I am enjoying this time but it’s winter. My ass is COLD and I want to fit into my size 10 (and that one treasured pair of size 8) jeans again. I can get them on and even zip them but they’re so embarrassingly tight. This is evident by the ring of loose skin/fat that now hovers over the waist and of course, by the painfully honest words of my 5 yr old daughter who came up to me yesterday while I’m sitting down, kinda poked at my stomach and said…

“Your tummy is still fat”.

Tell me something I don’t already know, Sugarbear

My husband, on the other hand, being the apparently smart man that he is, tells me all the time that I look great. I so appreciate that.

I want my old body back. Not this worn out old thing that wets it’s pants every time it coughs or sneezes… (embarrassing side effect of having a 9.6 lb baby).

Because I am a “glass half full” type of person (I know…just call me Pollyfuckinganna), I prefer to think about what I got in return for this sacrifice. And it’s true. I got something pretty great. But I sure wouldn’t mind wearing my old jeans on a cold night like this. *sigh*

Channeling Vegetables

TQ: I don’t like onions.

Me: They’re okay when they’re cooked. Have you tasted them?

TQ: No

Me: Then how do you know you don’t like them?

TQ: I read their mind and they told me what they taste like.

Me: Oh, okay. *barely suppressing gales of laughter *

˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚

Thanks to everyone for you kind words for The Story of P and all the happy birthday wishes for him. I appreciate it. We didn’t throw him a party because we’re going to have one this Wednesday at the beach. We’ll be there for four days doing our annual beach reunion with Hubz’s family. Frankly, that’s about 2 days too long for me. I’ve never lived more than 30 minutes from a beach but being all whitey-white like I am, I typically burn despite using copious amounts of sunscreen. Add a baby toddler (he took his first multiple steps this week!) and a 5 yr old and it’s really not my dream vacation but it will do. Hubz has been so grumpy lately, I hope he gets some R&R out of it and recharges his pissy batteries.

So yes, I’ll be away for a few days and since we’ll have a dial-up connection and one laptop between us, I doubt I’ll be getting much screen time. I’ll definitely miss reading all your blogs too much to not peek at a few but I’m pretty sure I won’t be doing much on the computer. I considered asking someone to guest post here but I don’t want to impose on anyone so I’ll probably just take a spin through the archives…

And because other than my son’s birth story, I haven’t been living up to my Mommy Blogger title and writing about my kids much at all, I’m going to start a monthly posting about them. I read a really good one the other day and it inspired me. I feel guilty that I’ve hardly done anything for P, in particular. No baby book or calendar, no photo albums; nothing but my monthly calendar with all his milestones scribbled on it. The second kid always gets the shaft… But I’m going to challenge myself and try to move past that. My memory sucks and P is impossible to video so blogging will have to do. And TQ, who was easily the world’s most photographed child before her brother was born, is growing up so fast, if I don’t document it now, I won’t have any record of her every having been this age. I’m wallowing in a bit o’ mommy guilt here. Can you tell?

Tomorrow will be packing day. It always takes a whole day to pack for the beach. I absolutely cannot stand it. I become ADD-Mom, running around, grabbing things willy-nilly; going into a room and forgetting what I went in there for and getting totally sidetracked by something else. And if that wasn’t enough, when we finally arrive at the hotel, I will realize about 10 things I forgot so it will be back out to Target to buy it all. So much for relaxing!

Speaking of packing, I don’t even know WHAT I’m going to do about BlogHer. That 15 lbs of baby weight I’ve been bitching about for a year is still with me, my wardrobe is for shit, my hair need serious help and I haven’t weaned P yet. I think I’ll save all that for another post. My plan was to be brief but if you come here with any regularity, you night have noticed I don’t do brief very well…lol

I doubt I’ll post again before we leave but please be sure to stop back while I’m gone as there will be something here, even if I’m not.

{{hugs to all}}

(I just finished this for Mrs. Mogul. I’ve been busting my booty all morning trying to get it done so I can start the nightmare known as packing and now I wish I hadn’t…)

PS: Did anyone get an email from someone named Chad Horton?
PSS: The next time I consider conceding to my inner skinflint and buying some bargain beach towels for TQ to take to camp, someone please remind me that after washing those pieces of crap, all my lighter colored towels (and my khaki shorts that somehow got mixed in) are now tinted blue and covered with a thick layer of blue, fuzzy lint from said shitty, cheap-ass towels and that it was so not worth it.