My Childrens

I have three kids. Damian, is the oldest and the only boy (poor kid). He turned 3 last month. He's getting so big so fast... its crazy. He counts, he talks, he is so silly that it kills me sometimes. He's an awesome big brother to both of his sisters, when he wants to be. When he comes home from pre-school and I ask him what he did that day he just says, "I had fun" in this completely exasperated-duh-mom! sort of voice.

He likes to eat fruits, and his veggies if he has something to dip them in. The kid LOVES condiments... its really kind of disgusting. He's beyond dramatic. He can go from smiles to tears in seconds. And his little lip is all pushed out and frowning. He is my actor to be :)

Then there is Natalie. Nattie is 1 1/2 and all attitude. She's so damn cute, and she knows it. She will throw a fit from hell if told no. She can deafen you with a shriek when she gets just a little upset. She knows how to make Damian scream and cry. She can talk a little bit. Her favorite word is "No" of course. She also says "Thank you", "Please", "Hello", and "Bye" and who knows how many others.

Nattie really surprised me when we had our other daughter. She does so much better with the baby than I'd thought she would. Nattie knows how to melt you like chocolate in her little pudgy hand.

 And last is Ashleigh. She's only two months old. But she's pretty damn cute if I do say so. I love that she smiles already. My other two wouldn't smile constantly until they were at least 3 months old, and Ashleigh has been doing it for at least the last half of month. Its adorable.

  Usually, my children are running around, screaming, and generally raising hell. But yesterday when they came home from school, they were being so sweet! Ashleigh was in laying on my bed, me and her had been hanging out while everybody was gone. Well, I'd left her there to go outside for a few minutes, and when we came back, there was Nattie, just sitting there chatting away to Ashleigh.

  Then an ornament had fallen off the tree, so I asked Damian to help me put it back on. So he grabs it and takes like 10 minutes trying to decide where he wants to put this ornament. Well Nattie started to get upset because Damian had an ornament, and she didn't, so I got her one that was extra and let her have it. As she was playing with it, she dropped it and it rolled under a chair. She looks at me and goes "Uh-oh!" and starts looking under the chair. Damian was standing there at the time, and immediantly tells me, "Its okay Mom, I'll get it. I'll get it Mom." So he went around the back of the tree and reached under the chair and got her ornament for her. It was just so cute the way he told me that he would get it. He's my big helper.

  So after Nattie had her ornament, another one had been bumped off the tree. Damian was right there to put it back on though. After he put it back on the tree, he started to count the ornaments. He counted all the way to 20 all by himself. I can't believe how big and smart he is getting.... I remember when he was just a baby baby.

  They were just being so cute!!! But it didn't last long, all too soon they were screaming and yelling and causing chaos. But it was great while it lasted

Cartoons

  We watch a lot of kiddie cartoons at our house. Damian has reached  the age where he enjoys watching TV and can tell you what he wants to watch. His favorites are Dora, Diego, Caillou, and Umizoomi. If he hears that one of these shows is on, he is right there, yelling "No, no! I'm watching this!" if you even pick up the remote.
 Most of the cartoons that he watches are fairly educational. They teach him to count (if he doesn't realize anybody is watching, he can count to 20 by himself), how to speak better, and manners. He really enjoys watching these shows, he can tell me the names of the characters and what they are doing.
  I honestly can't remember much of anything that I watched at that age. I can't remember much of any TV shows before the age of about ten. I know that I watched a lot of Disney movies; The Lion King, Snow White, Aladdin, etc. The shows I do remember were things like The Looney Tunes, Animaniacs, Tom and Jerry. These shows weren't educational in the way of todays shows. We learned things like don't play with dynamite, when it comes to arugments between ducks and rabbits, the rabbit is going to win. Our shows were about entertainment. Today is much more focused on fun, interactive learning. I'm not saying this is a bad thing.
  I don't know if you've ever watched Dora, or Deigo, or Barney, but personally, they drive me absolutely crazy. My kids love them, and would watch them nonstop if they could probably. But as an adult, these shows make me want to throw the TV in the garbage can. Singing is a big part of these shows. Kids love this. And the songs they sing are really simple, child attention grabbing, rhyming little ditties... that get stuck in my head for hours on end.
  I was at work the other night, humming a song and doing my thing, when I suddenly realized that I was humming to a song off of Barney. It was horrible. The fact that it took me at least 10 minutes to realize where this song was from disturbs me even more.
  I remember hearing once upon a time that The Looney Tunes were unethical because of all the violence involved. Wile E. Coyote always blowing himself up trying to catch Roadrunner. Marvin the Martian shooting other characters with his ray gun. So eventually The Looney Tunes went pretty much extinct on TV (although they did come back, at least for an hour a day). But if you really wanted to argue the point that children shouldn't watch them because of the violence factor and that children will take it to seriously, todays shows really aren't much better. Diego is a prime example. He is pretty much completely unsupervised, and is always doing crazy stunts like jumping off of waterfalls, chasing after wild animals, and other crazy things.
  My mom can't stand the kids shows for more than an hour or so. But if I turn on Tom and Jerry or something like that, she doesn't seem to mind as much. So its not just me who likes the oldies more. Even my son quite enjoys Tom and Jerry. Some things just never go out of style.

Long live Buggs Bunny!!!

Boys Bathroom

 One of the thing I'm responsible for doing at my job is cleaning bathrooms. Usually this isn't too bad. Go in, spray everything down, wipe it all off, and done. It only takes like 5 minutes for me to get both the boys and the girls restrooms cleaned up. And of course I do this everyday. And sometimes, when I walk into the boys bathroom, I can't help but wonder just what in the hell they do in there.
  With winter being here, we salt our sidewalks and parking lots. Its great at melting off the snow and ice and such, but it also tracks into the store on people's shoes leaving white footprints all over the place. Well, one night I was following some of these footprints, and they went into the boys bathroom. So I open the door so I can mop them all up, and while I'm looking at them, I notice something... The footprints go directly to the garbage, and thats it. They didn't turn towards the toilet or the urinal, they just faced into the corner with the garbage can. But I just dismissed the oddity of it, mopped them up, and continued on my way.
  The next night, when it came to mop, there I was, mopping up footprints again. Sure enough, they lead to the boys bathroom. Yet again, they don't go to the toilet or the urinal, they stopped in about the middle of the room. By this time, I couldn't help but wonder why none of the footprints actually approached either of the main components of the bathroom. So I decided I would watch for footprints for the next little while, just to see if I ever had a set that actually went up to the toilet/urinal. For the next week, there was only one night that they actually approached the toilet. I just can't help but wonder just what the hell they were doing in the bathroom. I'll admit, when I think of this, I get this mental picture of all the guys that go in there trying to piss into the toilet/urninal from across the room.
  We have these little things that we put down into the hole of the urinal. Its just a cleaner thing, kinda like the toilet bowl cleaners that you can hook onto the rim of your toilet. Only this one goes down in the urinal hole. Its got a round center, with little holes all the way around it filled with the blue cleaner, and a kind of triangular outside that keeps it from going down the drain or wiggling out of place. We have to change these about once every two months of so, depending on the number of times that the urinal gets flushed.
 Well one night, I went in to clean the bathroom, and the inside of the urinal was blue. Some individual (I'm going to have to assume that it was a small child) had dug their fingers into the blue cleaning stuff in the little holes, and thrown it all over the inside of the urinal. I looked at it for a moment, went and got my coworkers so that they could enjoy the "Wtf?!?" experience, and then proceeded to clean it. Or try to. I had kind of thought that if I sprayed it with our restroom cleaning spray and flushed the urinal, it would just kind of ooze down and into the drain. This was a very ineffective attempt. That blue stuff was stuck, it wasn't rinsing off, and it wasn't wiping off with a papertowel. I had to scrub it vigoriously with a damn toilet brush, and some of it was STILL stuck on there.
  I'm still assuming (and kind of hoping) that it was a little kid that did this. I have to wonder how well the blue stuff washed of his hands. But my main question was what in the hell would possess anybody (include a kid, unless under the age of 3) to put their fingers into the thing they all piss on and throw it all over the urinal. WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?! EWWWW!
  And the other most interesting thing I've encountered in the boys bathroom was smell. We all know guys smell. Its just a fact. But sometimes it kind of amazes me just how much they can smell. I was went in to clean they boys bathroom recently and couldn't believe the smell. No, it wasn't a nasty shit smell, well not exactly. But you know when you go to the zoo, and you walk through the reptile house, that damp, humid, funky smell? Boys bathroom smell just like that. I opened the door, and my first thought was "Zoo". I have to ask, just how did that particular smell get created in a boys bathroom??

  Its things like these that make me seriously wonder what the hell men do in the bathroom. Women use the restroom almost twice as much as men (where I work at least) and yet, I never have the issues in the womens that I have in the men's room. How many things can men really be doing in there???
 

Have You Ever Wondered.....

   So I am a person who constantly askes questions that most people don't have the answer too. Hell, I'm pretty sure that most people don't wonder these things in the first place... So if you so happen to know the answer to any of the following, feel free to enlighten me (and everybody else).

1. Why is slush called "slush" when its on the ground, but called "sleet" when its coming from the sky? What is the point of having two different words for the same substance? Rain is still rain, whether on the ground or falling from the sky. So is snow, and sunshine. So why are there two words for slush??

2. When you go to a resturaunt, they usually ask you, "Would you like a table or a booth?" I want to know who the hell came up with the phrasing of that question. Wouldn't it be more accurate to ask "Would you like a chair or a booth?" Because boothes come with tables (duh!). And the point of asking is to find out what the customer would prefer to sit on, right? You don't sit on the table, you sit on the chair (at least most people do). So how did it become common practice to ask "Table or booth"???

3. Sometimes products hold contests or give aways to promote their product right? And there are always rules and regulations that are included in that. But if you've ever read the rules, pretty much all of them say "No purchase neccesary" Isn't that kinda like saying "Try our product! Enter to win [insert grand prize here]! We don't even care if you pay for it!" or "Go ahead and steal the cap off this soda and enter the code online to be the next big winner!"  Does that mean its cool to just go and take the lid of a soda so you could enter the contest. Because "no purchase neccesary" and its not like you actually stole the product.

Sleeping Beauty

 So I've been watching Sleeping Beauty a lot lately, because of my kids. They love the princess. We watch it 10 times a day at least. So I've noticed just how lame everybody in this movie is...
  Starting at the beginning, the 3 good fairies give the baby princess 3 magical gifts. The first 2 give her beauty and musical ability... Does that mean she would have been an ugly untalented child otherwise? They gave a princess (who would have had pretty much everything anyway) both extraordinary beauty AND talent.
  Then she gets cursed, and they counteract it by making her sleep until true loves first kiss... does that mean if she would have kissed the prince in the woods she would have slept forever? Does true loves second kiss just not measure up?
  Then the prince gets captured by Maleficent, and has to be saved by the fairies. They have to free him from his chains, give him a sword and shield, then they have to help him get out of the place. He actually does nothing but run away. And when Maleficent turns dragon and attacks him, the fairies have to put a spell on his sword so it kills her. This prince has absolutly no talent at anything except singing and dancing. He is a crap hero.
  And why can't the fairies just do something about Maleficent in the first place. They say they can't because they can only use their magic for good, but isn't defeating an evil being defined as "good"? Maleficent was only cursed the princess because she wasn't invited to the party. Why didn't somebody just send her and invite? Sure, they might not have wanted her there because she's evil and all, but what did they really expect to happen by not inviting her???
 
  Yes, this is a very cynical view of a Disney classic... But sometimes I just can't help but wonder these things. I suppose thats the reason cartoons are aimed mainly at children, because some of us are much too practical for our own good...