After much waiting — and many false starts — WG is now a proud papa of an absolutely beautiful baby boy, the Little Pirate.
Congratulations to one of my original — and favorite — Venomites and his lovely bride!
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Over the weekend, the Big-Eyed Boy and a new neighborhood friend used my son’s basketball not once but twice — twice! — as a dodge ball, both times targeting a much younger neighbor child who dealt with the resulting bloody noses like a real Trooper.
Naturally, I impounded the thing and have since informed my boy that, regardless of how classy the parents of the brutalized boy handled the situation, I was not pleased. He spent the rest of the evening in his room, miserably, and was taken the following day to inquire about the neighbor boy’s well-being so he could issue yet another apology. Frankly, I still don’t think the penalty was strong enough but I’m not sure what else I could legally do to teach him how to be more empathetic.
Then today my son began throwing a handball around in my formal living room, knocking over both one of my favorite family pictures as well as destroying a lamp. I took that one away, too, and in addition to sending the boy to “time out” on the steps for 30 minutes I put the ball into “toy time out” which lasts for a week.
Until recently, the Big-Eyed Boy had been a remarkably well-behaved child for the most part, which basically means that VH and I are just now having to train ourselves to exhibit the Parental Poker Face and remain stern when it’s time to mete out discipline. But, boy, is it hard. Today, well, the kid did put one right over the plate:
Boy: “So, when do I get my balls back?”
Me: “That’s really a question you’ll have to ask the woman you eventually marry, son.”
Yeah, I imagine we should probably add that to the list of things he’ll want to address with his therapist some day.
It’s been a rough day here in the Venomous Household. Delightful as it was having VH home for five straight days, the house is now a pigsty.
Meanwhile, the Big-Eyed Boy came down with both poison ivy and Swimmer’s Ear over the weekend, both of which necessitated middle-of-the-night medications and comforting. Although he’s mostly recovered, I have not: at 40 years old (41 in 2 weeks, for those keeping track of such things), I don’t mess with “beauty sleep” anymore. I sleep to escape my aches and pains. Also, my kids.
So this morning when the BEB was up at the crack o’ dawn after a mere 6 hours of sleep, I knew it was going to be a long, miserable day. A day on which I’d be eyeballing the liquor cabinet even as I poured my first cup of coffee. A day on which I’d be lucky to squeeze in a quick shower, all the while knowing that a leisurely bath was out of the question. (Too much temptation to see just how long I could hold my breath before passing out.)
One would think by now that my kids had learned to tell the difference between when Mommy is smiling and when she’s just clenching her teeth. It seems an easy enough distinction to me: the latter is usually accompanied by a loud grinding sound, whereas the former is accompanied by a martini handed to me by my husband… who simultaneously announces that he is taking over parenting duties for the rest of the evening.
One would also think that my kids would realize that just because Mommy’s voice doesn’t sound like she’s about to have an aneurysm doesn’t mean she’s not about to. The clue is s not so much how I say something as what I say.
For instance, if I say: “What would you like for lunch?” it’s a sign I’m feeling a bit flexible. On the other hand: “Do you want chicken strips with fruit salad or leftover scraps of whatever the heck that green thing is underneath your bed?” means it’s probably time to clean underneath their beds. After lunch. Which is going to be chicken strips with fruit salad, so don’t even bother asking for egg salad, got it?
Likewise, our family tends to use lots of pet names for each other: “Sweetie”, “Honey”, “Angel”, “Little Guy” and “You, not not the cat, YOU“. But if Mom calls them by their actual names — not even the first and middle names together, mind you (because both of their middle names are mouthfuls and too much to expect any one frazzled mom to utter when completely and totally stressed out) — that’s a sign they’d better listen up. Now.
But do they get it? The oldest one does, possibly because after surviving sixteen long years (17 next month) she sees the light at the end of the tunnel. (The shadow she sees there is me waving my arms frantically, beckoning her on.) The little one, my Big-Eyed Boy? Clueless.
Witness, for instance, his question of just a few minutes ago after he’d dumped his Matchbox Cars into the machine along with a full bottle of Tide and started flinging the suds everywhere.
“Mommy, why are you counting to ten? Is it because you’re worried you’re so old you might forget how to do it if you don’t practice?”
It’s a good thing my son is so darned cute, I tell you. A very good thing.
The NY Times announced today that teenage boys aren’t necessarily the horny little devils we parents of teenage girls believe they are. According to a “fascinating new report” based on a confidential questionnaire given to 105 10th-grade boys, whose average age was 16, boys are actually motivated by love and a desire to form real relationships.
Which I might buy, if that statement wasn’t followed shortly by this one:
Most of the boys had dating experience, and about 40 percent were sexually active.
And therein lies the problem when you’ve got a 16-year-old girl: knowing which 1 out of every 2.5 boys asking her out hasn’t been laid yet because that’s most likely going to be the guy trying hardest to get into her pants.
The story of Megan Meier, the 13-year-old Missouri girl who committed suicide after being spurned by the person she thought was her online boyfriend, just keeps getting stranger and more infuriating by the moment.
Megan had transferred schools earlier this year after being excluded from the “popular crowd” because she was overweight. In the process, she decided she no longer wanted to maintain some of her old friendships. But at her new school she blossomed, dropping 20 pounds and joining the volleyball team. She even met her first-ever boyfriend, “Josh”, through her MySpace page.
Only problem? Josh was actually 47-year-old Lori Drew, the mother of one of those friends Megan had stop hanging out with, and she was determined to “mess with Megan”. That’s what she told a neighbor, at any rate. What she told the police is that she wanted to gain Megan’s trust so she could find out what Megan was saying online about her own daughter.
So Drew, pretending to be Josh, flirted with Megan for a full month. Then, just as Megan began thinking of herself and Josh as a couple, Drew-as-Josh typed: “I don’t like the way you treat your friends, and I don’t know if I want to be friends with you.” A day later came the fatal message: “The world would be a better place without you.”
Later, Megan told her mother that hateful MySpace messages about her were being posted. Some called her a slut. Some called her fat.
Megan hung herself in her closet. Her mother found the girl and cut her down from the belt she’d wrapped around her own neck. Megan died the next day still believing that her first boyfriend had wholly rejected her.
Megan had been on antidepressants, a fact of which Lori Drew was aware since Megan had previously accompanied the Drews on family vacations. She’d also been diagnosed with ADD and had been under the care of a counselor. But those sensitivities were, apparently, not nearly as important to Lori Drew as teaching Megan a lesson that proved to be fatal.
All of this, because middle-aged Lori Drew couldn’t accept what normal adults figured out long ago: friendships end, and the best way to help our kids when they’ve been dumped by a friend is by helping them learn to make new ones. Megan Meiers mother didn’t get a chance to do that because Lori Drew abdicated her parental role and took matters into her own hands, posing as another child so she could — let’s face it — get petty revenge on the girl who’d hurt her little girl’s feelings.
Meanwhile, there’s nothing the law can do about it. As the St. Charles’ County Sheriff’s Department spokesperson says of Drew’s behavior, “It might’ve been rude, it might’ve been immature, but it wasn’t illegal.”
Ironically, Lori Drew filed a report with the Sheriff’s department against Megan’s parents for damaging a foosball table belonging to the Drews. It seems Megan’s family had agreed to store the table in their garage at Lori’s request. Six weeks after Megan’s death, when they learned that Lori Drew was behind the hoax that led to her suicide, they took a sledgehammer and ax to it and dumped the pieces on the Drew’s driveway.
Yes, you read that right: Lori Drew all but caused Megan Meiers’ suicide, then wanted to press charges against Megan’s family for taking their grief out on a foosball table.
You know, that woman ought to be damned glad she’s not my neighbor. I’d have skipped the table and gone straight after her with the sledgehammer and ax.
Just when the list of recalled toys seems like it couldn’t get any longer, or any more worrisome, comes news that one popular item — Aqua Dots — is actually coated in a substance can make children vomit and render them comatose.
Scientists have found the popular toy’s coating contains a chemical that, once metabolized, converts into the toxic “date rape” drug GHB, or gamma-hydroxy butyrate, U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission spokesman Scott Wolfson told CNN.
“GHB is this drug that in low doses actually causes euphoria,” said Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent. “In higher doses, it can cause people to go into a coma. It can cause seizures. It can cause something known as hypotonia, where all your muscles just become very flaccid.
“And it can cause people to become amnestic, … which is why it became a date-rape drug,” Gupta said.
“So this is nasty stuff, and it appears that the chemical is actually converting into it in the body.”
Aqua Dots have been sold in the U.S. since April and had recently made Wal-Mart’s list of “Top 12 Toys”. They are sold in Australia as Bindeez Beads.
Parents are advised to throw the toys out immediately.
If you’ve ever been a “regular” at a bar or other gathering place, you know that sooner or later all of the other bored people around you are going to entertain themselves by opining and speculating on your life since they don’t particularly like their own. Most people just ignore such gossip, find themselves a new watering hole or take up a hobby, like boating, to help them unwind.
I’m guessing one Czechoslovakian couple wishes they’d done that, too:
A Czech couple who decided to take a DNA test to squash persistent pub gossip and prove that their 10-month-old baby was their own got a nasty surprise.
The couple, from the southeastern town of Trebic, had some doubts about the child as her hair was blonde and they both had dark hair. Fellow drinkers’ suspicions got on their nerves.
But the test showed neither of the parents had the same DNA as the baby, Czech news agency CTK reported Wednesday, suggesting a mix-up at the hospital.
Authorities were looking into the case.
If their legal system’s anything like ours, the lawsuit against that hospital’s going to pay for them to start their own bar.
But that doesn’t get their biological baby back, does it?
What would you do if you were in their place: raise the child you’ve thought of as your own for 10 months, or try to find the one that’s actually yours?
I took The Big-Eyed Boy for a toy-shopping trip at the PX earlier this week only to find the toy section crammed with workers busily emptying the shelves. Until then, it hadn’t dawned on me just how enormous the Mattel Toy Fisher-Price recall was until I saw those bare shelves.
Nearly 1 million plastic toys in the U.S. is no small matter, nor are the concerns about protecting children from lead paint, the toxic substance believed to have been used by Chinese manufacturers of the toys.
As I guided my son to another aisle, I passed a woman there with her own kids. She looked as harried as I felt, and nodded toward the clerks pulling boxes of toys from the shelves. “Do they have any idea what kind of a meltdown my kid would have if I took Elmo away from him?” she whined.
She hurried on before I could ask her if she had any idea how much of a meltdown she would have were her kid to get lead poisoning from his beloved Elmo toy and suddenly needed bouts of chelation therapy to save his life.
Sure, her son looked healthy enough but then again Amanda Taylor hadn’t exhibited any signs of lead poisoning when her parents took her in for her routine immunizations. As part of a new protocol, Amanda was given a finger stick blood test to screen for lead. Ordinarily, a count over 10 is serious, while 70 is life-threatening. Amanda’s was 136, and a subsequent x-ray showed lead paint chips in her intestines.
The toddler ended up receiving repeated injections, a much painful process than oral EDTA chelation.
Taylor said her daughter received shots in her thighs every four hours around the clock for six days.
“The medicine they injected is very thick, so it wasn’t like when you get a shot that’s over in a second,” (Amanda’s mother) said. “They actually had to put the needle in and plunge it and it took a bit, and it hurt.
“The first time, it only took one nurse and me to do it. By about the third time, it took four of us to hold her down with all our might. It was rough on everyone to have to do it.”
Although Amanda’s lead levels are now down to 25, she continues to be tested every three months. Her parents have to work closely with a nutritionist to make sure she gets the calcium she needs. They constantly have to monitor her for anemia as well since any form of chelation therapy — including oral chelation — works by binding lead and other metals to dietary iron so the toxins are excreted through the urine.
Amanda continues having trouble sleeping, and her parents say she’s exhibiting aggressive behavior, throwing tantrums and showing both behavioral and social delays — all due to lead poisoning in her system. She’s facing a lifelong struggle, in part because lead remains in bones and tissues even after it’s been removed from the blood.
Just how long she and her parents will be dealing with these problems isn’t clear, but one thing’s for certain: a momentary meltdown over an Elmo doll would’ve been far more simple to deal with.
Kind of makes me wish I could’ve clocked that woman while I had the chance.
The Big-Eyed Boy and I hacked, sneezed and wheezed our way through yet another allegery-riddled night. His poor little eyes look like something out of a scary movie: glassy, shot through with red. Mine aren’t much better: they’re swollen and crusted, which means that even though I hate wearing my glasses, there’s no way on earth I’m catering to my vanity today by trying to shove contacts in my eyes. Not that there’d be much point to it, anyway — with the pollen count high (and made worse by the wooded area behind our house), we’re destined to stay cooped up indoors.
It’s barely 10 a.m. and I’ve looking at a long day of keeping a rambunctious child entertained. Saturday morning cartoons? Watched ‘em. PlayStation? Done that. Books? Read three, and now my throat’s hoarse. He’s miserable and bored. I’m bored being miserable. We’ve got to find something to do indoors.
Right now, he’s fascinated with a Formula One Game. He’s playing as Schumacher, who’s wearing a jumpsuit in the boy’s favorite color: red. His opponent is the scraggly-haired May, complete with leather jacket and faded jeans. The game’s a trivia competition with questions about Top Gear and Formula One, which puts the content definitely outside of my 7 year-old’s knowledge.
That’s not stopping him from loving it, though, because the “prize” for getting an answer correct is smacking down your opponent with a flying kick to the head. (Who, incidentally, gets to smack you when you get the answer wrong.) My kid’s more interested in listening to the “Ooof!” and the zooming cars in the background, and thinks it’s hilarious when either guy delivers a round-house to the other’s noggin.
I can’t help laughing myself, to tell you the truth. The Schumacher character strongly resembles Bill Clinton, making it all the more fun when he takes one to the schnoz.
Just when I thought I’d made myself clear why kids shouldn’t be allowed to wear heelys in grocery stores, I bumped into a kid - literally - wearing them at the movie theater today. At the movies!
Now, just to clarify something I said earlier, I do see a time and a place for wearing such things. They’re fine at the park, they’re fine on the sidewalk, they’re fine in an empty parking lot or even a roller rink. Basically, I think they’re great — when accompanied by appropriate safety gear — in places where rollerskating would acceptable.
Hey, were I a bit younger, a bit more resilient, and a bit more insured, I’d probably own a pair myself.
But at the movies?!
I confess that at times home-schooling starts to wear on my very last nerve and I long for a place my son and I could both feel good about. It’s been years since I’ve even looked at daycare, though, and much of that is due to the bad memories I have of the few places I did check out.
There is nothing — nothing — worse than walking into a daycare with your child in your arms and smelling the reek of dirty diapers, hearing the clamor of unhappy children and seeing tables, toys and floors streaked with graham cracker crumbs hardening in a pool of spilled juice. Unless, perhaps, it’s experiencing all of that and knowing that this is, indeed, the very same place that once looked so clean, calm and inviting before you began shelling out hundreds of dollars each month and leaving your child in their care.
Yeah, I’m a bit jaded about daycare. Then again, I never knew how to go about finding a good childcare center or nanny beyond opening up the phone book.
Parents in Canada at least have a bit more information about locating a good daycare thanks to a free site that serves as a virtual meeting place, helping parents and childcare providers connect quickly. With unique search features that allow parents to look for daycare in their zipcode, then select providers based on their child’s age and their budget, the site helps parents save on gas while looking for the best environment for their kid.
But it doesn’t stop there: registered users of can post reviews of various sitters, nannies and childcare facilities, which means parents can help spare each other from bad experiences while applauding those places and people who deserve the acclaim.
If you’re a parent in Canada, check them out at DaycareBear.ca.
With all of the hoopla about transfats and childhood obesity, McDonald’s seemed intent on positioning themselves as something short of evil. They’d just launched a program enlisting six moms to act as “quality correspondents” for their food, giving them complete access to the company’s operations. The aim, of course, is to have these six moms convince the rest of us that McDonald’s food is wholesome and nutritious.
It’s an uphill battle. They can put all the white meat they want into McNuggets, they can offer apple slices and skim milk on the side, but fried food is fried food, and it’s never going to be healthy.
The very same moms who worry about whether other people will call them “bad parents” for not making their kids wear helmets while bicycling, for letting them stay up too late, for watching too much TV — these are the moms who are now worrying that feeding their kids fast food on a regular basis also qualifies as bad parenting. These are the same moms at whom the McDonald’s Mom Brigage is aimed at winning over right now.
And for the rest of us? Let there be McMovies — self-serve kiosks within McDonald’s stores that let busy parents rent a movie for $1. The catch? You have to return it the next day which means, naturally, that you must return to McDonald’s. Just go ahead and try doing that with kids in tow while refusing to buy them yet another Happy Meal.
Evil, evil McDonald’s. I am so not lovin’ it.
Technorati Tags: McDonald’s, Mom Brigade, fast food, childhood obesity, movie rental
Even with a surprise ending, it’s still an unspeakable tragedy. Seven kids, from two separate families, were under the care of a babysitter in a three-story row house in Pittsburgh. Then a fire broke out.
Neighbor Sontaya Perry, 22, said she could hear the children inside the house screaming as the fire raged from the windows before dawn. She said she tried to get in, but the wooden steps leading to the door were in flames.
“They were screaming, and five minutes later they stopped screaming,” Perry said.
Two of the children managed to escape the fire and stood outside the burning house, screaming for someone to help their brothers and sisters.
But where is the babysitter? That’s what police would like to know. For whatever reason, even though they’ve interviewed the parents, the police only know the sitter’s nickname. Right now, they’re not releasing that.
A sitter known only by a nickname? Seven kids under her care when a fire broke out and she is nowhere to be found? I’m afraid I know the outcome of this one: a babysitter who took off when the fire broke out or, more likely, before it even happened. And the parents no doubt are dealing with guilt in the midst of their grief, because what kind of parent hires a sitter known only to them by her nickname?
Answer: a sorry one. A very, very sorry one.
UPDATE: The parents may be even more sorry that it’s come to light they may have left those seven kids on their own without a sitter at all.
Someone in our house seldom remembers to put the CDs back in their case. Someone pops a CD in, listens to it, starts thinking about another CD, pops the first one out and sets it on top of the stereo, then pops the second one in. Someone always intends to go back and put the first one into its case — which is seldom conveniently left out next to the stereo since someone hates clutter — but almost never remembers to do so. So, someone’s CDs are quite often scratched and rendered useless.
I plead the Fifth.
The Big-Eyed Boy rarely remembers to put his CDs away, either. We have a collection of brightly-decorated but unlistenable children’s CDs now serving as juice box coasters. We call it recycling.
Now that I know the trick to using toothpaste to get scratches out of CDs, I may have to buy real coasters instead.
If your blood pressure has recovered from last week’s entry about pregnancy being the latest “fashion craze” among teenage girls, be warned that it’s about to go through the roof again.
A groundbreaking study on porn use by 13- and 14-year-old teens shows an alarming number are watching “more times than they can count” and their parents are unaware.
“If you’re 13 and you can’t put a number on the times (you’ve used porn), that’s a little frightening,” University of Alberta researcher Sonya Thompson said, adding 35% of boys fell into that category along with 8% of girls.[...]
The Internet was the most common way for kids to get access to porn, with about three-quarters of students reporting such contact.
Thompson found almost one-quarter of the boys watched pornographic DVDs or videos “too many times to count” and 35% said the same about Internet smut. The corresponding figures for girls were 4% and 8%.
Every day, I find new reasons to be thankful that my teenage daughter worked out her rebellion years ago and cemented her own healthy self-esteem (albeit at the expense of mine) and is now a level-headed kid with academic ambitions and the ability to reach them. Because stories like this are the kind of stuff that no longer keep me up at night. (Well, not usually, anyway.)
LONDON — The newest fashion among schoolgirls is getting knocked up, according to one pregnant 14-year-old whose four friends are also expecting.
British teen Kizzy Neal says she’s been approached for advice from other pregnant girls her age ever since she conceived, reported London’s Daily Mail.
“When my friends see my bump they say they wish they could have a baby, then three weeks later they’re pregnant and don’t know what to do,” Neal said.
“It seems to be fashionable to get pregnant. … Teenage girls think babies are cute, but they forget the physical side of being pregnant, then having to give up your own childhood to look after a baby,” she told the paper.
Neal says she got pregnant the first time she had sex with her 13-year-old boyfriend.
Sounds like it’s about time to introduce teens to a truly vintage fashion accessory: the chastity belt.
Look, I’ve got a kid and, as you all know, he’s rambunctious. Back when we lived in Hawaii, a visit to the mainland meant 13 hours of flying with that rambunctious kid whom, I discovered, gets wired when given the Children’s Benadryl his doctor had recommended. A bouncing off the walls kind of wired. A throwing his sippy cup kind of wired. A crying non-stop to the point that his parents nearly chugged the Benadryl themselves kinda wired.
Instead, VH and I wound up spending most of our flight from SF to Honolulu standing in the airplane’s bathroom, our son cradled between us, as we rocked him back and forth and sang lullabies. I was crying nearly as much as he did, albeit more quietly. It was all we could think of to do to keep our fellow passengers from throwing us off the plane.
But, as Kim notes, when a kid starts behaving like that before the flight, well, sometimes airline personnel step in. In the case of AirTran, they not only stepped in to protect the other passengers, but they also offered the parents what could’ve been a fantastic deal. Unfortunately, the parents are apparently as ill-behaved as their child.
I’m with Kim: I’ll fly AirTran any day. I’ll just make sure to book VH and the Big-Eyed Boy on a different airline.
This morning I woke up in my pajamas (treated with government-recommended flame retardant) and looked at my clock-radio (U.S. patent-pending, UL-approved, synched with Greenwhich meantime to reflect Central Standard Time) and one again felt glad to wake up in the Land of the Free. Grabbing the Universal Remote, I flipped on the TV to watch some FCC-regulated news brought into my home by a major cable provider currently under anti-trust investigation. Somewhere in my backyard, the Public Utility meter begam whirring faster as I started my day.
In the bathroom — which thankfully still meets code — my toilet, stamped with the required Low Water Consumption seal — gurgled right as I stepped under the water trickling from my flow-regulated shower head. I washed my hair with shampoo that contains materials approved by the FDA, and conditioned it with a similarly “safe” product.
Once clean - and dressed in clothes manufactured by American workers in OSHA-inspected facilities - I wandered to the kitchen to enjoy a lead-free mug of java (which presumably did not contain more than the FDA/ORA’s limit of 10% insect parts or mold when it was merely green coffee beans) and began wondering what to have for breakfast. Eventually I settled on cereal with milk to start meeting my USDRA of whole grains and dairy.
Naturally, since I’m still sick, I took the medication my licensed physician prescribed — which, thankfully, had also been filled by a licensed pharmacist and placed in an easily-identifiable bottle which kindly bears a stamp to notify law-enforcement and, I suppose, me of each pill’s shape, color and government-required stamp. Then I washed it down with a glass of drinking water, made safe for my consumption by our local water service, according to the disclosure they were recently required to send me in the U.S. Mail.
Then I sat down at the kitchen table to go over my son’s homeschool schedule for the day. Although I do not send him to a publicly-funded, state-sponsored school — and, indeed, at age 6 he’s not subject to compulsory school attendance in Kansas for few more months — having decided to educate him at home, I am still obligated to keep records (although not to show them to anyone) to demonstrate that he’s completing the state-mandated number of academic hours per year. I keep those records on my UL-approved, patented, registered laptop (the battery of which was recently recalled under a Government order for my protection) using software that I paid for but which, according to the license, continues to belong to its creator.
Since we needed additional material for the day, I logged on to my Internet Service Provider under my assigned IP address and nagivated my way through the World Wide Web to an educational site I’ve subscribed to (with the agreement that I will not violate their copyright by unlawfully distributing their material). I had a question about one project and so, after agreeing that I will not use the site’s forums for unlawful purposes or the distribution of obscene materal, I posted my question in their forum. Naturally, I had to leave a valid email address to ensure not only receipt of any responses, but to enable to forum-owner to identify me in the event I violate that license and law enforcement wants to find me.
About that time it dawned on me that I hadn’t planned anything for dinner. That means I’ll need to jump in my 5-star crash-test rated mini-van and buckle my son into his approved Child Safety Restraint — which he’s legally required to sit in for another 2 years — before driving the right way on the road going no faster than the maximum speed limit to our local grocery store where I’ll buy a USDA-Select roast along with whatever veggies haven’t been yanked from the shelves over fears of E. coli contamination. While we’re there, I might as well step over the the pharmacy to show them my state driver’s license and sign their register so I can purchase some cold medicine.
Then I’ll pay for it all after swiping my Customer Loyalty card — which tracks all of my purchases and notifies the store, or anyone else who asks, I suppose, if I purchase an inordinate amount of, say, sandwich bags — and, after the register calculates my total and State sales tax, I’ll pay for it all with a check (after producing my driver’s license and assuring the clerk that my name, address and telephone number are correct). Naturally, the money will be automatically deducted from my account, thanks to recent legislation that prevents unscrupulous folks from floating checks.
I’d been awake for less than one hour minutes, and yet I’d already negotiated through a labyrinth of standards, regulations, guidelines, orders, licenses, and laws. No wonder I’m so exhausted by mid-morning!
Now, after all of that, I finally pulled up my own web page (copyrighted under my name), and found Anwyn’s entry informing me that some lawmaker thinks there aren’t enough laws governing peoples’ lives. In fact, we need more. Yes, more! We need a law that turns parents into criminals if they spank their children. One has to wonder if that lawmaker intends to “grandfather-in” that prohibition — no pun intended.
Yeah, I’ve got more to say on the subject. But first I need to research the legality of recommending that a certain elected official’s mother take a retroactive “ovarian mulligan.”
