I’ve noticed most of the boys that T plays with (and my son as well) are absolutely obsessed with wheeled things — the girls like cars and trains too, but not with the same level of obsession. Occasionally I will know of the rare boy who is not into “things that go”, but it seems 98% of them are really, really into cars, trucks and trains.
It has been that way for T since before he was a year old (and not due to my encouragement because I find most wheeled things boring - and have you watched any of those Thomas the Tank Engine DVDs? Deadly). He said CAR and CRASH before he said Mama or Dada. And he has lots and lots of very loved, wheeled toys. Several months ago, I surrendered to the cult of the car and painted some roads and a “parking lot” (with diagonal parking) on a piece of masonite for all of T’s matchbox cars, an he and his friends love it. Also popular are the bristle blocks and the the legos (which T makes into trucks), and of course all of his wooden Thomas The Tank Engine train stuff. He does have other things that he plays with, but really the wheeled things are the most popular. Meanwhile, most of the stuffed animals get ignored in the crib until his “girlfriend” comes over and pulls them out.
Which brings me to a conversation I had on the phone last night with one of my closest friends, who happens to be gay. I asked him if he was ever was really into cars and trucks and stuff like that when he was a little boy. He told me, “not so much as I was interested in my sister’s dolls”. He thinks that at the time, that kind of thing was discouraged more than it is today, so he reallly didn’t get much chance to explore girl toys.
I don’t know if my friend is anomaly or not, but it got me a wonderin’. Not that it matters, but I am just curious. Are you a gay guy who loved/disliked cars, trucks and trains as a kid? Do you have any friends/relatives who are gay males, and know what they played with as a kid? Or, perhaps you are a straight guy who really didn’t like wheeled things very much? It’s my own very unscientific survey. Not for any good reason… I just gotta know.
1)Post pictures of your kid, available only to registered users. Forget to make it only available to registered users. Fix it. (Done)
2)Mess around with PHP and HTML on your blog templates, even though you don’t know what you are doing, and screw them up, just slightly. (Done)
3)Take A “Blogging Vacation”, for the umpteenth time. (Nah)
4)Do A Meme! (Nah, Never!)
5)Link endless Linkedy Links.(Nah)
6)Write about your inability to write.(Done)
7)Pick a random political subject. (Not Today)
8)Apologise for crappy content. (Sorry)
8)Suspect you’ve written this post before. (Too tired to check)
9)Fake depression, illness, drama or whatever to get reader’s sympathy. (Not That Desperate)
10)Make a list. (Obviously)
11) Go to bed. (Nite Nite)
A few days ago, I got our health insurance bills. The bills have (of course) gone up again, — we will pay, for a family of three, (relatively) healthy people, over $750 bucks a month. That’s way more than our mortgage. And that doesn’t even include vision or dental.
Does that sound like rape to you, too? Well, last year I called an insurance broker who told me that the rate at the time that we were paying, was pretty good, and that she couldn’t really do any better for me. WTF?
Ah, the “joys” of our being self-employed.
I have friends now who who have no health insurance because they can’t afford the $1000 bucks a month. They applied for medically underwritten insurance (which would have been a little bit cheaper) and she was denied because she recently saw a chiropractor and his BMI was too high. So they better be pretty healthy until he passes the Bar and gets a job with health insurance.
Another friend of mine, who just got diagnosed with a pituitary gland tumor, is not looking forward to the interim period after graduating college. For her excellent health insurance she will have to shell out over $500 a month for her cobra, until she gets a job with health insurance.
And, to think that in 1994, when I graduated college and my COBRA (continuation of benefits for health insurance) kicked in, I was paying only $127 bucks a month. Coverage for just me, right is now $314 bucks a month. I don’t feel like calculating the percentage increase in cost over the last 12 years, but I think it is about 2 1/2 times what I was paying 12 years earlier.
And in that time, is the quality of my care 2 and a half times better? Yeaaahhhh, riiiiiight.
I can shake my fist in a lot of directions over this one - the health insurance companies of course, but even more the drug industry, the most profitable in the U.S. (do we really need another expensive prescription antacid or statin drug? Do you really need so spend so much money on ads?). And of course, I shake my fist at our federal government for not doing enough.
The Canadian national anthem is calling me….
I’ve always loved the activites that the Enoch Pratt Library has for the wee ones. They have storytimes and playtimes for a variety of ages. We still go to them, when my son doesn’t have school or activities.
My new recent activity is to take advantage of the Enoch Pratt Library’s website putting books on reserve. When the books are ready to be picked up, I get a friendly, non-automated phone call from my librarian, telling me that my book is waiting for me at my local branch. And, unlike the county library, putting books on reserve for delivery to the branch of your choice is entirely free.
One thing I’m really desiring though (and probably because I am a dork) is that I’d really love to see a RSS feed for my checked out books, so I could put it my blog. I emailed the Pratt and suggested it, and was told that it might be possible in the future, but it would take some development (and demonstrated interest). So, if you are a local blogger (and as much of a spazz as I am) and would like the world to know you have Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (or something more grown-up) checked out, you might email the Enoch Pratt and let them know what you think.
I can say that I am not embarrassed about the fact that my son isn’t potty trained.
In fact, I recently discovered that in my son’s preschool class, only 1, or maybe 2 of the 12 kids are potty trained. Although, that might say more about the preschool I picked, since they don’t require it, and it is the “crunchy granola” preschool. Also, his class is mostly boys, and I hear that boys are harder to potty train.
He does pee on the potty very sporadically. But at 3 years and 3 months, he has yet to poop on the potty. Despite bribes of pie and cupcakes. I think he is an Eat To Live kind of person rather than a Live To Eat type, so that is probably it.
I’ve been told to wait until he is ready. Have him pee standing up. Have him pee sitting down. Just go bare bottom for a few days. Go right to padded underwear and not go back. Star stickers. Chocolate chips. Whadeva.
I do get major applause from him when I go. Even in the bathroom stall at Target. Yay! Mommy knows how to pee in the potty! Yay! Mommy can get chocolate chips for that!!! Isn’t that great, now everyone at Target knows, too!
I’m not asking anybody for any more advice. I’ve already gotten a ton of advice which is all contradictory. If I was really motivated to train my son I would check out books on it from the library — not that those are going to help, either.
Instead, to turn over a new leaf, I will look at the positive side of having a child that isn’t potty-trained. Really, changing diapers isn’t that bad. Hey, he changes some of them himself. I’ve heard a little about how boys do sword fights and I hear they are messy. I won’t worry, for the time being, about pee dripping through the floor and onto my precious Imac because of a little accident. And, I won’t be sweating it next time we go to a park and there’s no place to poop. I say, HA! to you parents driving around looking for a dirty McDonalds bathroom for your kids to go in… isn’t potty-training great?
One of my dear “mommy friends” is going on a trip next week, the mother to my son’s two year old “girlfriend”, a.k.a. Feral Sausage, and her 5 year old sister, a.k.a. Sausage. This will be quite an adjustment for me.
It means: 2 weeks without 3 home invaders unexpected drop-in visitors seeking chocolates and cookies playdates. Two whole weeks without juicy gossip, and without stuffed animals wearing my (uh oh) grandmother’s jewelry. Two weeks without multiple keyboards playing simultaneous demos of Jingle Bells. My son will have no one to ram toy shopping carts with, without his beloved Feral Sausage. My hair will be pulled and twirled by one less kid. Feral Sausage will have no one to hit with branches, and my son will have no one to try to flirt with (by throwing toys).
What the hell I am going to do for entertainment the next two weeks, I have no idea.
A culinary genius (of plastic food).
Grocery shopping, for me, is a real pain in the ass.
Like this past weekend when I went to the Trader Joe’s out in Pikesville. I was hoping to find some goodies for T that were dairy-free and weren’t processed on equipment shared with dairy. I’d just bought some nuts from Whole Foods, and T couldn’t eat them because they’d been processed on shared equipment. He probably wouldn’t have a anaphylactic reaction from shared equipment, but continued reexposure won’t help his allergies go away.
Turns out that Trader Joe’s, like every other grocery store I’ve been to, makes everything with dairy, or is processed on shared equipment. I spent an hour there trying to read the teeny-weeny print on labels and found a couple varieties of nuts, and 1 package of bland “cookie” that he didn’t like that much. 90% of what is in the all the stores is off limits for T. You’d be surprised what has milk in it - not just cookies and cakes but bread, crackers, tofu dogs, candy, margerine, granola bars, you name it. Why the hell that has to be, I don’t know. I’m sure some of these “shared equipment” warnings are just lawsuit-avoiders but you never know. I am not taking any chances since his last reaction.
And as T gets older he is more aware of everything he can’t have and I just feel bad for him. Over the holidays we went out for Chinese, and at the end of the meal, without asking, everyone was brought out little cups of ice cream with a fortune cookie on it. Of course the ice cream had milk in it, but so did the fortune cookie. The look on his face was so sad, his little lip started to pucker and quiver and his eyes were welling up, and they didn’t have any other dessert. So, the waitress brought out 4 marachino cherries in a cup, and he really liked those so he wasn’t upset any more.
That fixed the problem because he is three, but in a couple of years I’m sure marachino cherries won’t do. And as he gets older he will go to other kids houses whose parents, possibly, won’t read labels very well, or he will be and getting food from kids at school, perhaps against my best warnings (he better not!). Or, some family member, even myself, could miss something and make a careless mistake and end up like this family. I don’t think T is quite as sensitive as that girl, but we really don’t know. I will be crossing my fingers that nothing bad happens before he outgrows it, assuming he outgrows it, and that I won’t be getting any scary phonecalls or running for the Benedryl and the Epipen.
We went to the Baltimore Aquarium yesterday. It was pretty enjoyable for a kid-centered activity, although a bit pricey (around 59 bucks for 2 adults and one 3-year-old, not including 2 hours of parking costing $12). It was also very crowded, but it would have been better having gone on a weekday.
T loved it. He was so excited, he got over his fear of crowds quickly and kept running up to the tanks and yelling quite loudly, “Yook! (look) it’s a Starfish”!
“Yook! Its a shark!”
“Yook! It’s a Nemo fish!”
I kept telling him, “No T, that isn’t a Nemo fish, Nemo is the name of a fish in the movie. It’s a clownfish.” And he would say, “Yeah, a clownfish”.
But a few seconds later he’d see another tank with a clownfish again and would say “Yook, another Nemo fish!”
In fact, every kid at the aquarium, from the little one-year-olds to the 12-year-olds, was going up to the tank and saying “Look, Nemo!” And their parents were also saying, “Yes, that’s a Nemo!” I wonder if some of these parents call dolphins “fishes”.
And this is where I get annoyed. I know I’m being a bit picky and uptight here, I know that. But it is not a Nemo, it is a clownfish.
Oh well.
I guess I should just accept that it is no longer a clownfish and blame Disney for it. One stupid kid film is responsible for the miseducation of a generation of children.
I hate to admit it but I have a problem with piles.
And no you sicko with a dirty mind, I am not talking about hemorrhoids, I’m talking about piles of paperwork and stuff that needs to be put away.
Right now I’m at record high for piles… A total of 5. Here’s Pile #1…
I bought the stacking pile thingy to solve my pile problem originally. Unfortunately , piles propagate like bunnies and the file thingy overfloweth.
This pile on our dining table seems to ebb and flow like the tide. I almost killed that one.
One of these piles was stuffed under here when I needed to entertain at our dining table. Of course after the guests left, pile #3 returned as pile #2. Pile #4 in the box is the oldest pile, and I usually leave that one alone and pretend like it isn’t there. If there is something that I can’t find in the house, that is the last pile to be searched.
This is my upstairs pile which exists because I am too lazy to bring things down to my downstairs pile.
As you can see, blogging about being disorganized is much more fun than actually getting organized.
