Choice and Parenting Un-weekender

1) You knew it had to happen… *sshole dogs being shamed for their crimes. Because they aren’t likely to have Facebook accounts someday. (Real ones.) So here’s proving it’s not the size of the dog in the fight……

Or the number of working legs….

In fact, sometimes it doesn’t even HAVE to be a dog…

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2) The Answer Is Never.

A nod to choice (I am NOT talking about abortion), the annoying things some people might say about said choice, and a nod to the fact sometimes you cannot choose everything either. I used to pray all the time to kick butt at work. I don’t remember ever praying for children. Look how that turned out 😀 (By which I mean God infinitely knows better than we.)

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3) Holding on to that thought… When you want to do great things for God and He tells you to keep being a mum. Lemme add: Even when your kids are being total *ssholes. (In fact, *sshole kids need good parenting even more.) I’m just sayin’ <shrugs>. Because everyone wants to be Parent of The Angelic Kid Who Eats All Their Veggies, Doesn’t Like Youtube And Just Adores Homework <snort>. Unfortunately, you don’t get to choose who your kids are. Just as they don’t get to choose you. 😀

Before I had kids, my biggest problem with having kids was that they would be people. (Not say, dogs and cats and hedgehogs you could shame on Facebook all you wanted.)

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4) Oh yeah, like that’s not hard enough, people are gonna judge you too…. Worlds away, female company president apologises to all the mums she worked with. Similarly reported in the Daily Mail UK.

“I didn’t realise how horrible I’d been…. Until I had a child of my own.”

Well, now. I remember blinking in my first banking job when this 38 year old VP on the team came to work in a bright purple jacket over large, bright and loud floral print dress. She proudly declared, “My son (who was about 4 at the time) chose my outfit. He was more interested in colour combinations this morning!”

Another time, a Capital Markets senior lawyer in her 40s wore Hello Kitty dangly earrings for about a week to work. She had a 9 year old daughter. Back then I would never have made the connection, but today it’s like Bam. Of course. She never really lost the “Kitty, kitty, kitty,” behind her back, especially after just kicking butts in a meeting.

And well maybe sometimes you just try harder because you know you want to wear the Hello Kitty earrings 😀

That’s about as close a pic as I can find, of the pair this lady wore… But without the rhinestones… pic from clairvoyantoutift.loveitsomuch.com

A thing about books and covers comes to mind; neither detracts from actual performance, just the perceptions of it. But it is a myth that that always hurts you. 

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5) Eden Riley’s Hell. Met. Her elder son Max is 13. This is why I will do everything I can to convince them Wheels Don’t Work Without Helmets. (What? Can you explain completely how the tv works?) I was visiting and still in primary school when my uncle came home from a gruelling shift one day and went nuts about my cousin blading without a helmet on… because he’d just seen a child rushed to the emergency room a few hours earlier. The phrase “watermelon on pavement” stuck.

Poor Eden.

And so the Miss wore a helmet from when she moved barely 2 inches at a time on her scooter (if she moved at all). Ditto the other fella (but as you all know the real crazy one is not the older child :D) Because I hope when she gets to whizzing about and doing stunts she will feel absolutely weird unless she has a helmet on. 

What, you thought I was freaky about her going 20 feet an hour? No, it’s so I don’t have the fight when she gets to what looks like 200 miles an hour.

(Mind you, I am not very squeamish. I have remarked to friends in the past, that “simple” broken limb bones can still heal (and there is a tradeoff between a learning experience and the loss of that from being too freaky about everything), but if it’s the head or back (or some bacterial thing to the same effect) you may not be coming back from that… And so to the irony of freaking out over a scraped knee but letting a child go helmet-less I guess…)

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6) The Miss plays tribute to Hello Kitty this Easter in her dressup skit: “Cat.”

This was her on her way to her school Easter party before the break.

As in, POOF!

Yeah she went on the school bus that way too…

To be exact, they were supposed to dress as book characters, and the Miss chose to be Sock, Girlfriend of Julia Donaldson’s Tabby McTat:

pic from Amazon.co.uk

But I couldn’t find anything beyond the mask and ski hat until one of her classmates mums bought her that outfit. Was wondering what that was about, until:

Ah so. Yes dis is a black Hello Kitty with the exact same pink leopard print on her outfit!

Then it clicked.

Have a good rest of the week…