Take No Guff, Give No Quarter

Lately, I have not been in the mood to take any guff. A fifth-or-sixth-grade boy may have discovered that last week.

After S1′s t-ball game, played at a public park, was over, S1 and some teammates ran full speed ahead to the playground. They saw some scooters laying on the ground. They proceeded to pick them up and ride them. A pack of fifth-or-sixth grade boys hanging out at a picnic table, noticed.

“Hey, they’re taking our scooters!”  Being near the jungle gym with S2, I watched as the cretins hulked across the playground toward the kindergarteners, S1 included.

The cretins shooed away the little kids. S1 and his teammate begin running towards the boys, and running away from them screaming, pretending like they were being chased.

One of them approached me. “Can you control your children?” he asked.

“What did you say?” I asked him. Surely I hadn’t heard right.

“Can you control your children?”

“I’d like to control you. Now why don’t you just go play?”

He looked at me, confused, and then walked off.

Now I know how my dog feels when a growl rises in her throat.

I’m Only 37!

Way back in 2010 or 2011, when this blog was new, I wrote about being mistaken for being older than I really was (see “I Am Not a Grandma” and “A Tale of Two Casinos: Or, Why Men Don’t Age”).

Tonight after t-ball, S1, S2, and I went to the grocery store to eat supper. As we sat in our booth, S1 kept pointing at me.

“S1, why are you pointing at me? Stop it.”

“I’m pointing at you because you’re the best mama ever,” he explained, “and you’re older than everybody.”

Hey! I’m only

Spelling Is a Talent

Today as I was driving, I saw a woman standing on a very narrow concrete median on a very busy street. She was wearing a bright-orange safety vest. The way people drive in this town, no one should trust their life to a vest.

She was holding a bucket, hoping passers-by would toss in some money. The sign on the bucket said, “Kids National Talent Competetion”.

Apparently, spelling is not the talent.

C-O-M-P-E-T-I-T-I-O-N.

Spelling Is a Talent

Today as I was driving, I saw a woman standing on a very narrow concrete median on a very busy street. She was wearing a bright-orange safety vest. The way people drive in this town, no one should trust their life to a vest.

She was holding a bucket, hoping passers-by would toss in some money. The sign on the bucket said, “Kids National Talent Competetion”.

Apparently, spelling is not the talent.

C-O-M-P-E-T-I-T-I-O-N.

A Six Year Old’s Not Sexy

Elmo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When you have little kids, you are immersed in a sub-culture of little kid-dom. I don’t know why S2 is captivated by Elmo, but she is.

Recently, a male co-worker who also has two small children asked me more than once if I had seen “Elmo and I Know It”on You-Tube. It was Elmo’s  version of “I’m Sexy and I Know It“, he told me. It was funny, he said.

 

I had never heard “I’m Sexy and I Know It”.

Unfortunately, six-year-old D’Avonte Meadows of Aurora, CO, had heard the song. He told a female classmate, “I’m sexy and I know it”. His school suspended him for three days for sexual harrassment.

http://denver.cbslocal.com/2012/05/04/6-year-old-suspended-for-singing-im-sexy-and-i-know-it/

I sang “Like a Virgin” when I was ten. Trust me, at ten, I had no idea what a virgin was.

That’s probably the same with D’Avonte Meadows. Did he say it to a girl to harrass her?He was probably just talking or singing to whoever was nearby; it just happened to be a girl.

In the workplace, the person who is the object of the person’s behavior is supposed to indicate that it is unwelcome. In the schoolyard, among 6-year-olds who may or may not know what “sexy” even means, common sense would certainly be welcomed.

Don’t criminalize being a little kid with a big mouth.

Signed, a former ten-year-old in 1985.

P.S. Elmo’s version is hilarious! Watch it here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbXEGQaHFjU&feature=fvst

Langston on Life…

Langston on Life

“Folks, I’m telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean-so get yourself a little loving in between.”

–Langston Hughes

 

Time Really Does Equal Money!

Around the age of 4 or 5, S1 stopped giving smiles so big they showed his dimples. He preferred to snarl, for reasons I’ll never understand. If you prompted him to smile, say for a picture, he would flash a fake smile. Fake smiles looked well, fake, and hid his dimples.

School pictures captured fake smiles. The poor photographer, having to snap pictures of hundreds of kids in a short amount of time, does not have time to stop and capture the dimple-laden smile I love so much.

My way around that is to take him to get his picture made at a studio. S1 likes the attention, and likes the ladies. Women cooing at him is just too much for him to withstand.

He flashes his dimples; I sit through an attempt to get me to spend $200 on photos with enhancements–fancy backgrounds, borders, and even S1 in sepia. The first photographs taken in the 1800s were sepia-colored. We’re not in the 1860′s anymore, Toto! The boy’s not sepia. Just give me the plain ol’ color photos, so I can see what he really looks like!

Tonight, as I was turning into the parking lot of Wal-Mart, I got a call from the portrait studio there. Was I still planning on coming in at 7pm? I told the person I was pulling into the parking lot, and he sounded very disappointed.

What happened next was a dream come true. The guy didn’t ask me about backgrounds. He picked one simple background, and took only ten poses of S1. He asked me if I wanted the $7.99 photo package. How much did I want to spend?

I told him that I wasn’t going to spend $200 on pictures. He told me good, he was ready to go home. I spent about $30, a litle less than I usually do, and I didn’t have to go through torture at S1′s picture time.

The whole picture-taking process, from the popping of the camera to the swiping of the debit card, took 35 minutes. This was great. He saved me so much time!

 

As we were preparing to leave, he said, “I hate to ask you this, but would you mind being a Good Samaritan and giving a dollar?”

“For what?” I asked, figuring it was for the March of Dimes. “For bus fare,” he said.

I was surprised at how unprofessional he was being, but hey, he saved me lots of time, and time does equal money. I gave him a dollar, and thought how he had just helped me write a new post.