Today we went to the Natl Zoo to see the baby lions before they aren't babies anymore. It was sunny, warm and slightly windy. Our party consisted of me, the kid, and the man's parents. We packed our lunch in coolers and parked in the lot near the biggest set of picnic tables (the last lot near the "Barn" or petting zoo, in case you need to know. The man's dad is a FONZ member, so parking is free, and as with all Smithsonian locals, entrance is free.
Ater lunch, the day was going well. Area schools have Spring break in a few weeks yet, so all the other visitors consisted of stay-at-home moms with hers of young children, college students, and tourists from all over the planet. Did i mention it was a nice day? We went to the zoo in April 2010 and it was 95 and gross out, so it was great to have an actual spring this year.
All of a sudden the kid had an accident in her pants and we had to visit the bathroom located near the "mane cafe." There was poop everywhere, it was like she'd rolled in mud. Potty training is hard stuff and as previously mentioned, my kid's got a few extra issues on top of regular potty training issues, so if we only have one pee accident a day, we count it as a success. I take what I can get,or I'd be insane. It doesn't help that all the other women with kids the age of mine or slightly younger brag that theirs are already night trained and day training "only took a day." Lying bitches.
Anyway, so there I am, wrist deep nasty runny in poopy at the zoo when a herd of VERY, VERY LARGE DOUGHY PALE people (picture small cow sized dumplings) rush in. It was a grand mom, daughter, and 4 youngins'. I had nothing against the people at first, UNTIL youngin' #2 started the laughing, pointing, staring, questioning and harassing of me and my kid. "Why doesn't your kid go in the toilet like everyone else?" and "doesn't she know you're not supposed to go in your pants?" with the ever helpful "that's just disgusting. she's disgusting. Do NOT put those pants in your bag!" On and on it wwent. MissM was in tears sobbing "I'm sorry Mommy. I tried" among other things. I'm going to point out here, I was minding my own trying to do damage control and had been awesomely putting up with the mentally ill/dementia suffering MIL with a 3yo and agoraphobic FIL all over the zoo. I am a trooper but I was about to snap here. I looked up at the kid, noticed her twin sibling, other siblings, mother and g-mom just standing there egging the kid on into new heights of rudeness. These people were from Germany or somewhere where German is the native tongue BTW. People say we Americans are rude assholes, but we've got nothing on these jackoffs.
I'm going to note something else here. I support a charity for families of people with Autism and I was wearing my Autism hat at the zoo. It's my fav hat b/c it's comfy but not heavy or hot, and it's cute. I often forget I'm wearing it when I have it on or what it says until someone does something to remind me. When I wear this hat, people assume my kid has Autism and often follow me around trying to figure out if my kid's defective. When my kid has a temper tantrum, people point at my hat, then the kid and shrug to say "Oh, that explains it!" People even strike up convos with me to share battle stories about our Autistic kids etc.
Generally, I don't care if people assume my kid has Autism or not, nor do I care if they play the "let's see if she behaves funny" game with my kid either, b/c it makes me laugh. People are that messed up. It is ironic to note that my kid does have a disability, not Autism though, that few people would know about unless they've taken classes in developmental issues and then spent time watching my kid with her peers. My kid can "pass," well, until you ask her to do things she should be doing specific to her age, like pooping on a toilet more often than not or self feeding. So, in a small way, people who do look at my hat and then watch my kid to play the "wtf is wrong with her?" game, are actually right, my kid isn't exactly like most of the kids her age and if there were a hat in support of kids with her issue, I'd probably wear it proudly.
So back to the bathroom. After a few previous offers of assistance/nosy questions had been fronted, everyone in that bathroom was operating under the assumption that my kid had Autism and several people looked sick that these fat German bastards were picking on my developmentally disabled kid for being developmentally disabled. Since my kid is developmentally disabled (again not Autism, but still DD), I was horrified that these assholes thought it was appropriate to attack my 3yo.
I didn't result to violence, and I sort-of blacked out about that time, but it wasn't pretty.
After I got the kid cleaned and out of the bathrrom and calmed down, we found the in-laws, explained the situation and the MIL was lucid enough to calm ME down while the FIL took MissM to look at panda bears. It's been at least 9 hours and I am SILL PISSED. Every time we saw those mofos around the zoo, I wanted to make a scene, but I didn't, b/c MissM had been traumatized enough.
this was he first time someone has picked on her b/c she's different and I'm not sure who it hurt the most, me or her.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Dear Cheese Heads:
Please hang in there. The rest of us in the nation are counting on you to fight this fight for us. If you cave, we have NO CHANCE.
I grow tired of all these "greedy" teacher protests. Every 2 weeks $250 is taken out of my guy's paycheck, as it was when I used to work. My pension was paid for by ME, not the gov't. Before I left, things were starting to get bad. We were taking pension cuts, pay cuts, talks of furloughs, benefits cuts, paying more for medical benefits all VOLUNTARY. This happened about 20 years ago, and they promised that when the economy recovered, the state employees would be comped for the pension cuts/steps that has been lost. They lied.
This is one of the reasons I was happy to leave when I did. We weren't asking for a lot, and we were giving up many things without complaint. But right now, anyone with enough time is retiring and they're not replacing them. Teachers are teaching out-of-subject, and more than 3 preps, which is against contract. They aren't hiring people to replace the retirees, so class sizes are swelling. Obama is ending the terrible NCLBA from Bush, but he's got his own plan and it's just as convoluted and UNFUNDED as NCLB was, except it's almost worst b/c states are worse than broke and really can't afford to change the system again so soon. On Fox etc. they bitch that teachers only work 9 months. I'm here to say BULLSHIT to that. I don't know one educator that does not have at least 2 jobs. Here's another truth, a lot of the people complaining about "lazy teachers" wouldn't last a day with 180 kids, Hell, they can't stand to last 3 with their own.
When did common people working hard become the enemy? It's sad when pundits/people tout that some person on wall street deserves $300,000 a year but someone making $50,000 is greedy so they don't. WTF? I don't care who you are, if you make more than $100,000 in the US right now, YOU ARE RICH. You're not bad, but you're rich compared to 85% of the nation. That's reality.
You know, I LIKE services like trash pick up and snow plowing. I like it when all 300 desks at the motor vehicles are manned with people who have more than 3 functioning brain cells. Usually there are 300 desks, 2 workers, and 1 brain cell shared when I go into the MVA. I have no problems paying taxes to man the desk at the MVA, for snow plowers, for trash pick up, and yes FOR TEACHERS too.
These people work hard, are decent human beings, and they PAY for their retirements. Let the people retire before they die at their jobs and give them a bit of respect. Even if you don't respect someone who doesn't make $300,000 a year on Wall Street, you need to realize that you can only beat a dog so much before it lashes out at you and bites back. It's dangerous to consistently attack that many people, it leads to BAD, BAD things socially. Seriously, pick up a few history books. Then again, if you could read a history book, you'd be thanking a teacher instead of attacking them.
I grow tired of all these "greedy" teacher protests. Every 2 weeks $250 is taken out of my guy's paycheck, as it was when I used to work. My pension was paid for by ME, not the gov't. Before I left, things were starting to get bad. We were taking pension cuts, pay cuts, talks of furloughs, benefits cuts, paying more for medical benefits all VOLUNTARY. This happened about 20 years ago, and they promised that when the economy recovered, the state employees would be comped for the pension cuts/steps that has been lost. They lied.
This is one of the reasons I was happy to leave when I did. We weren't asking for a lot, and we were giving up many things without complaint. But right now, anyone with enough time is retiring and they're not replacing them. Teachers are teaching out-of-subject, and more than 3 preps, which is against contract. They aren't hiring people to replace the retirees, so class sizes are swelling. Obama is ending the terrible NCLBA from Bush, but he's got his own plan and it's just as convoluted and UNFUNDED as NCLB was, except it's almost worst b/c states are worse than broke and really can't afford to change the system again so soon. On Fox etc. they bitch that teachers only work 9 months. I'm here to say BULLSHIT to that. I don't know one educator that does not have at least 2 jobs. Here's another truth, a lot of the people complaining about "lazy teachers" wouldn't last a day with 180 kids, Hell, they can't stand to last 3 with their own.
When did common people working hard become the enemy? It's sad when pundits/people tout that some person on wall street deserves $300,000 a year but someone making $50,000 is greedy so they don't. WTF? I don't care who you are, if you make more than $100,000 in the US right now, YOU ARE RICH. You're not bad, but you're rich compared to 85% of the nation. That's reality.
You know, I LIKE services like trash pick up and snow plowing. I like it when all 300 desks at the motor vehicles are manned with people who have more than 3 functioning brain cells. Usually there are 300 desks, 2 workers, and 1 brain cell shared when I go into the MVA. I have no problems paying taxes to man the desk at the MVA, for snow plowers, for trash pick up, and yes FOR TEACHERS too.
These people work hard, are decent human beings, and they PAY for their retirements. Let the people retire before they die at their jobs and give them a bit of respect. Even if you don't respect someone who doesn't make $300,000 a year on Wall Street, you need to realize that you can only beat a dog so much before it lashes out at you and bites back. It's dangerous to consistently attack that many people, it leads to BAD, BAD things socially. Seriously, pick up a few history books. Then again, if you could read a history book, you'd be thanking a teacher instead of attacking them.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
good people, bad mom?
MissM loves school buses. I don't know why. She got a toy bus that she hauls around everywhere and clings to in the car. I took her on a metro bus and one would have thought we went on a trip to the moon with how happy she was. Her best pal at day care gets to ride the school bus 2 times a day to go to half-day pre-k. He hates it b/c he's naughty at school, but he LOVES coming home and telling MissM all about the bus. My guy has a pal who drives a bus in the next county over. He said he'd take MissM on a ride on a half-day b/c he'd have a window of time. So, this am we got up extra early and went to meet Mr.M. at his bus and take a ride. He gave us a tour of the bus and explained all the lights and buttons etc. We then went on a ride in the front seat and after a spell, Mr.M. had us move to the farthest seat back to go over a series of speed bumps. When the bus went over the bumps, we flew up into the air about 18". MissM loved every second of it. She's been ill this week and it probably wasn't the best decision to wake a sleeping sick kid up early and take her out in the cold without breakfast to go ride a bus, but it was worth every second of it to see her smile and hear her laugh like crazy.
Later in the day we were at Walmart getting some things when MissM asked for a coloring book. She's getting better at coloring and likes the $1 books and rarely asks for something, so I got her one. I couldn't remember if we had crayons in the car, so I picked up a 3pack of 2 sided chubbies. These are neat crayons. There's a different color on each end and they're extra fat. MissM loves these crayons. I couldn't find a bar code, so I felt nervous about getting them. As a compromise, I picked up a 16pk of thick crayons (thicker than the small but not as thick as the chubbies) and we went off to check out. Well, as feared, the cashier couldn't sell me the 3pk of the crayons MissM likes and we had to get the 16pk of the less favored crayons. Another woman went back to check out this mysterious stack of crayons without bar codes and later stopped us on the way out the door. Apparently the 3pk was supposed to be attached to a coloring book and sold as a set. Someone removed all the crayons and left them in the aisle and then bought all the books. The woman wasn't technically allowed to sell us the crayons, but since someone else already paid for them, she gave us the 3pk for free. That just completed MissM's day. That woman didn't have to be so nice, and she was.
I am often surprised at how nice people are to my daughter and they really restore my faith and hope in humanity.
Later in the day we were at Walmart getting some things when MissM asked for a coloring book. She's getting better at coloring and likes the $1 books and rarely asks for something, so I got her one. I couldn't remember if we had crayons in the car, so I picked up a 3pack of 2 sided chubbies. These are neat crayons. There's a different color on each end and they're extra fat. MissM loves these crayons. I couldn't find a bar code, so I felt nervous about getting them. As a compromise, I picked up a 16pk of thick crayons (thicker than the small but not as thick as the chubbies) and we went off to check out. Well, as feared, the cashier couldn't sell me the 3pk of the crayons MissM likes and we had to get the 16pk of the less favored crayons. Another woman went back to check out this mysterious stack of crayons without bar codes and later stopped us on the way out the door. Apparently the 3pk was supposed to be attached to a coloring book and sold as a set. Someone removed all the crayons and left them in the aisle and then bought all the books. The woman wasn't technically allowed to sell us the crayons, but since someone else already paid for them, she gave us the 3pk for free. That just completed MissM's day. That woman didn't have to be so nice, and she was.
I am often surprised at how nice people are to my daughter and they really restore my faith and hope in humanity.
Monday, January 17, 2011
hottlanta
i'm going to atlanta in june b/c my guy has to go and i want to go somewhere warm damnit. if we fly, it'll be just the two of us, but if we drive, we'll bring the kid.
I want to see/plan to see:
the aquarium
the botanical gardens
stone mountain
if i have time:
Martin Luther king jr's house etc.
the Carter museum
the kid's museum (if we bring the kid)
there's also a tour of CNN and Coke which seem like good emergency back-up plans like if it rains the day i want to go to the botanical garden.
we're staying at a nice hotel that's near the aquarium, so i know that's a done deal.
There's also a kangaroo breeding place that looks good for the kid. The Columbus zoo has a herd of kangaroos that MissM loved. they're in a giant walled in and covered garden there and you walk around amongst them. MissM asked a zookeeper if she could ride a kangaroo and he got very pissy . WTf does he expect out of a 3yo anyway?
this is the bright spot on my horizon as my sister and her kids are moving to St Louis soon and I won't see my niece or nephew for a very long time. This winter has sucked ass so far oh god and we're just starting TAX SEASON.
I want to see/plan to see:
the aquarium
the botanical gardens
stone mountain
if i have time:
Martin Luther king jr's house etc.
the Carter museum
the kid's museum (if we bring the kid)
there's also a tour of CNN and Coke which seem like good emergency back-up plans like if it rains the day i want to go to the botanical garden.
we're staying at a nice hotel that's near the aquarium, so i know that's a done deal.
There's also a kangaroo breeding place that looks good for the kid. The Columbus zoo has a herd of kangaroos that MissM loved. they're in a giant walled in and covered garden there and you walk around amongst them. MissM asked a zookeeper if she could ride a kangaroo and he got very pissy . WTf does he expect out of a 3yo anyway?
this is the bright spot on my horizon as my sister and her kids are moving to St Louis soon and I won't see my niece or nephew for a very long time. This winter has sucked ass so far oh god and we're just starting TAX SEASON.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
repost: dec 2010 in pics
In no apparent order:
dragon mom and baby at a walk-through garden light show (MissM's favorite display)
mandolin eating a salad for lunch after church (she's telling me about Jonah having messages for EVERYONE!)
a scarf for one of the ladies at chick-fil-a (she loved it)
bird we saw on a walk (we kept seeing this guy, so maybe he's moved in for good?)
2 bunny blankets 5 baby mermaids and 2 footballs fr the day care kids (they loved it all)
rudolph the red-nosed reindeer gift bags full of the toys for day care (it came out cute)
Gusgus in a gift bag (death wishes!)
MissM in the snow (Apparently snow feels like kisses)
a blue kindle cover for my sister's little kindle (she LOVED it)
an oatmeal flecked kindle cover for my dad's large kindle (he loved it)
MissM's new big girl bed and big girl bed sheets and quilt she got for christmas (did you know that pink ballerinas are THE BEST?)
Saturday, December 18, 2010
done.
i'm done. today i got it together enough to complete the shopping and wrap almost all of it. my b-i-l took the tape and paper or i'd be 100% done. I finished making the toys for MissM's daycare party on thursday. I made 5 mermaids, 4 bunny blankets and 2 footballs plus gift bags. One of the bunny blankets and one mermaid were for friends who don't attend the same daycare, but they were on the list. I am in the middle of one kindle cover and thinking about the second. I still need to make 3 prayer shawls, but those will come in 2011. some woman offered me $40 for a baby blanket and then asked for a second (also $40) and $30 for 2 bunny blankets +materials. I just don't feel up to a baby blanket project right now. Tuesday night we're going to take MissM to the light show at the national zoo, i hope i survive it. people in masses get on my nerves at the best of times, but christmas time+my loss+cold+in-laws=disaster. my favorite purchase was buying and then printing an amazon kindle gift certificate for my dad. It took 3 seconds and no real effort from me. amen. MissM did a good job at the advent show at church and will repeat the performance christmas eve. i'm trying to find someone to go with me. i don't have the strength to go alone. one of my best female friends at church is very pregnant and i'm happy for her, but i'm so sad for me. on the 26th i'm supposed to load me and the kid into the van and drive to western md to visit family. the thought of it makes me tired and depressed. i wanted to meet up on the 1st at a restaurant half-way, but they rarely consider what i want. i gave the cards to my guy to mail. if you got one, i'm glad. if you didn't, it's his fault and you should send him vibes to get stamps.
i was in lane bryant earlier getting a gift card for my sister and the cashier was rude to me. i didn't have the energy to call her on it. i explained i wanted a gift card for my sister. she said she thought i was making a credit card payment because i didn't have any items. i was a little shocked that she thought i was there to buy for me, since i'm clearly too small for the store. i stated that i'd lost over 90lbs and that at a size 4, lane bryant just isn't for me, even if the clothing is pretty. she asked if i wanted to get coupons in the mail. that's how my entire week has been since sunday. i think i've had enough and this cloud of misery needs to float on away.
this is how charlie brown feels
i was in lane bryant earlier getting a gift card for my sister and the cashier was rude to me. i didn't have the energy to call her on it. i explained i wanted a gift card for my sister. she said she thought i was making a credit card payment because i didn't have any items. i was a little shocked that she thought i was there to buy for me, since i'm clearly too small for the store. i stated that i'd lost over 90lbs and that at a size 4, lane bryant just isn't for me, even if the clothing is pretty. she asked if i wanted to get coupons in the mail. that's how my entire week has been since sunday. i think i've had enough and this cloud of misery needs to float on away.
this is how charlie brown feels
Monday, December 13, 2010
lost
i had a miscarriage at 6:30 this morning. i'm having one of the worst days of my life and i just want to crawl into a hole and cry and i can't because i have to choke back my sobs and try to smile and play with my daughter instead. someone has to fix breakfast, fold laundry and go to the store. i want to pretend christmas isn't coming this year too, but that's something else i'll have to sit though and insist that i'm fine, when i'm not. we didn't tell anyone, it was a christmas surprise.
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