Tag: Rants

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What’s the big deal?

As you know if you know me, or may have gathered if you don’t know me but have ever stumbled upon this blog before, I’m a very laid-back person. I don’t get riled easily, I don’t follow controversy, I HATE confrontation, and I’m not a fan of debate. (which brings back terrible grade school memories, ick)

For this reason I rarely discuss hot-button topics, here or in my non-internet life – politics, religion, etc. But there is one topic which gives people fits that I just don’t get – homosexuality.

What the?? I can hear many eyeballs putting on the brakes right now. And that’s ok. Like I said, I know this is a very hot-button topic, sometimes scalding actually. And kind of out of left field since lately I’ve been talking mainly about being pregnant here.

But I read an excellent post by Glennon over at Momastery today, and it got me thinking. And agreeing.

What’s the big deal if someone is gay?

I just don’t understand it. How can that possibly determine their worth as a person? Does one’s sexuality really serve as a legitimate foundation for judging every other quality about them, usually without even knowing them personally? Their work ethic, their morals, their overall ability to simply be a contributing, functioning human being?

And why, too, should that be the determining factor in what rights they are given? The right to marry, the right to have children, the right to actually be happy like the rest of us “normal” people (please know that i mean that in the most sarcastic way possible. gay or straight certainly does not determine normality in a person. actually, what does? who’s the standard for “normal”? uh-oh, there’s another whole post…)?

Again, I just don’t get it. Call me liberal, call me anti-religion (which i kind of am. not like i hate god and all organized religion, but i just don’t have a very strong religious lifestyle), call me crazy, but being gay certainly does not make a person unworthy of the love and happiness a straight person has. Hell, I know a lot of gay people who are infinitely happier than many straight people I know.

I really hope I can raise our children to be tolerant, no not even tolerant but unquestionably accepting, of this also. Besides her absolute safety, the 1 thing I want D to know above all else (well, and Dv2.0 now too) is that she can come to us at absolutely any time, anywhere, with anything, and know that we will never love her any less. Yes, we may be severely disappointed and possibly heart-broken, but we’ll never not love her.

You’re gay? So what! You got a tatto? So what (as long as you were 18 and it was legal)! You’re pregnant? Umm, well not so what, but we’re definitely not going to abandon you. You’re in jail? Ok, so maybe my “so what” answer wouldn’t work for everything, but I could never stop loving her. Yes I’d be beyond pissed and trying to imagine the worst punishment she’d ever endured, but the love would always be there.

So I guess this is just a long way of saying why is being gay such a big deal? Love whoever you want to love. Be happy.

 

 

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Ode to daycare

Oh, our daycare, we do love it so.

D loves to constantly learn and play and grow.

She whines a little when we arrive,

But after hand washing she’s off to thrive.

 

Her days are filled with art and song,

And sometimes she acts like she’d rather stay there all night long.

The teachers in all of her rooms so far

Have been absolutely wonderful – right now she’s a Shining Star.

 

But there’s just one thing about which I need to complain.

And no, it’s not that today’s filled with rain.

You see this thing keeps happening;

This thing which does not make my heart sing.

 

Every couple weeks the tell-tale signs begin –

Coughing, sneezing, snot rivers down to D’s chin.

Her excellent sleep patterns are soon replaced

By this screaming monster whom I’d like to punch in the face.

 

Not one night has gone by this week

Where we haven’t awoken to her midnight shriek.

“No, not again, go back to sleep!” I silently pray.

For I know this will lead to yet another horrible day.

 

A double ear infection, pink eye, and yes, she’s on meds.

Unfortunately they haven’t yet helped to calm her nighttime head.

I, too, now feel the beginning of this damn stupid cold,

And these aches, pains, and bloodshot eyes are getting quite old.

 

So dear daycare, you’re the best, but give me a break!

I don’t know how much more sickness our little family can take.

Your kids are all cute, I’m not gonna lie.

But I’m now pretty certain they can all shoot biological-warfare grade snot straight out of their eye.

 

 

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The witching hour

I’ve heard a lot of parents lamenting that time of day when their kids tend to go a little more berserk than normal. It’s apparently usually late afternoon or early evening, and it always seems to happen around the time said parents are trying to get dinner made and on the table.

And I’ve always secretly heaved a sigh of relief that D doesn’t really have one. A witching hour, that is. She’s normally very cheery and playful when we get home from daycare, ready to eat soon after we arrive, then happy to play around in her toy area for most of the night until bedtime.

Bedtime can be another story, but when that happens it’s usually because she’s too tired and doesn’t want to trust me that she’s ready to sleep. Silly girl, still hasn’t learned that Mommy knows best, even when she screams otherwise.

Unfortunately, we seem to have discovered her witching hour this week, on the dawn of her 20 month birthday. And how lucky are we? It occurs at 2am. Whee!

The past 2 nights she has awoken in fits of howling right around that time. Did she hear a noise? Did she have a bad dream? Did she just want to rebel against the rest of our world who likes to SLEEP at that hour of night?

Now, she did start a cold on Sunday that has progressed over the past 2 days, so there is that aspect, but still. 2 nights in a row? That’s a little much, my dear. She might average waking once a week or so, but rarely on consecutive nights.

And last night was awful. The sleeping cough she almost always gets with her colds began, so I knew it was probably going to be a rough go. Little did I know that she would wake approximately 78 times between 2-4am. That was great fun.

Poor R is suffering through the adult version of D’s cold right now, and he even got up to help with her fits last night. We took turns, alternating shifts. He gave her some baby Tylenol at one point, but I’m not sure how much it helped. I was trying to magically plug my ears and pretend there was not a wailing child in the house.

So, all this to say, I’m tired. We got a brand new mattress set this weekend, and I’m now 0-2 on nights enjoying it. The thing is an absolute monster – king size pillow-top, and my feet don’t even touch the ground when I sit on the side of it! It’s taller than D now too, so she gets frustrated that she can’t pull herself up on it like she could on our old one.

I envisioned nights of sweet, cushioned, squeak-less slumber, but instead I’ve been greeted with incessant toddler screams and ghosts of pre-dawn terrors.

I do feel terrible for D – you can tell she’s uncomfortable and it took everything I had to wake her up this morning when it was time to get ready for school. But I really hope tonight is better.

Maybe this is payback for inwardly thanking my lucky stars that we don’t have that late-day witching hour. Because if I had to choose between 4pm and 2am, I’d happily say BRING IT ON 4PM!!

 

 

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And then there was a toddler in our bed

There must have been something in her milk Saturday night, because D ended up sleeping in our bed for the 1st time ever. We do NOT make this a habit, obviously, when she can’t sleep, and usually she will eventually go back to sleep in her crib after waking in the middle of the night.

But for whatever reason she just wasn’t having it Saturday night. Try as we may, she wouldn’t sleep more than about 10 minutes at a stretch back in her crib.

Feel my pain? Here’s an approximate timeline of how our evening went:

8:00-9:00  Trying to get D to settle down, put toys away, and get snuggled in for night-night. R and I were engrossed in Season 1 of Downton Abbey on Netflix, so we wanted her to nestle into the blankets on the couch with R and fall asleep, like she often does. She was restless.

9:00  D finally conked out in his lap, so he carried her into her crib.

9:00-11:00 R and I become addicted to Downton Abbey. Well, I’m addicted. He may have just been humoring me by watching all these, but I think he actually kinda likes it too.

11:00ish  D starts crying, so after it becomes clear she’s not just sleep crying R goes in to rock her back to sleep. I hear little cries coming from her room off and on.

11:15  R comes back out to the living room carrying D, who is still not back to sleep. He puts her in the blankets with him on the couch again, but she instantly pops back up and now wants to play after seeing a puppy on the tv. Wrong.

11:15-11:30  I take her back in her room to rock with her turtle projecting stars and moons on the ceiling, and she eventually goes back to sleep.

11:30ish  I go to bed.

11:45-12:30  D wakes up 2-3 times, each time I rock her back to sleep. Those “sleeps” last no more than 10 minutes each. I’m getting really tired.

12:30  R goes in to try to get her to sleep and says he’ll just go lie on the couch with her. I know he’ll end up having to spend the rest of the night out there with her if he does, so I say just bring her into our bed. Little did I know that was the beginning of the end of any hope for a restful night.

12:30-6:30  D sleeps between me and R. And coughs in my face all night long. R bails at some point before morning to take up residence on the couch. Lucky. At 6:24 I awaken to a small arm moving back and forth over my forehead, then a finger in my eye. Nice wake up call.

So yeah, that wasn’t the most brilliant solution, and I now know why we haven’t tried it before.

D took 2 naps yesterday for the 1st time in months.

 

 

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(Semi-)Blacked out to stand against SOPA/PIPA

Why the black bars up in the corners today? you may be wondering. A day of mourning? Not exactly.

Without completely blacking out my site (i wanted you to still be able to see me! well, and to give a little explanation of what’s going on, too), I’m joining thousands of others to put the Internet on strike for a day in an act of protest against the proposed Internet censorship bills SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act in the House) and PIPA (Protect IP Act in the Senate). SO-what?

Essentially these 2 controversial pieces of legislation aim to put control of the Internet in the hands of the government and corporations, namely the entertainment industry. They claim it’s to try to crack down on rogue foreign websites and Internet theft, but a core goal of these bills is really to get people to maybe buy more Hollywood movies. What the what? Yeah, I know, that’s what I thought too.

There are, of course, many more intricacies to and repercussions of these bills, and my synopsis above barely scratches the surface. Please watch this video for an excellent recap of what may happen if this legislation does pass.

If you’d like to join me in the protest, head on over here and here for details and to email Congress to stop the bills. For the sake of retaining my freedom to keep my blog as I know it, thank you!

 

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I want to run

The changes are big, bigger than I even expected.

I’m left alone, and it makes me nervous.

Feeling crushingly overwhelmed, actually.

I don’t know this feeling, and I don’t particularly like it.

It’s not my friend. It doesn’t suit me.

I wear confidence and happiness much, much better.

It makes me want to run, straight into the arms of something to which I’m better suited and truly enjoy.

But if I ran, would I make it?

Could life as we know it survive, be ok, and even grow?

Or would we stumble, fall, and ultimately fail?

Do I have the courage to risk it?

I don’t think so. No, not yet.

Do I want to? Absolutely.

Someday.

But perhaps not now.

Perhaps now isn’t the time, but it’s out there.

Waiting for me someday. Someday hopefully soon.

Not hopefully – it will be. Soon.

I will make it so.

But not yet.

I want to run, but I must be smart.

Know what I have and be thankful I have it. For now.

An opportunity? I can’t see it as that yet, but maybe.

Don’t run.

But I still want to…

 

 

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Beware parking and Frontier

Hi guys! We’re back from vacation, and although I long achingly to be back in the Maui sun, it is nice to be done traveling. And it was funny – when we got home last night and walked in the house, it looked surprisingly bigger than I remembered. Odd, since we were only gone 10 days and our house is tiny.

I will have plenty of vaca recap posts complete with picture after picture after picture, but I need to get them all organized first. That in itself will take a few minutes, but I promise they will come.

First, though, I wanted to warn you about 2 things we encountered during this trip. One night last week we parked in a public lot during a dinner out in Lahaina, a little beach town on Maui, and our credit card number was ripped off by the outfit running the lot’s pay box. It was one of those lots where you park in a numbered space, then pay at the unmanned box/kiosk based on your space number. Well, instead of being charged the $5 for the night of parking, they tried to charge over $620 on our card online from Barcelona last weekend. Um, yeah right.

Fortunately our credit card company called to alert me to some possible fraudulent charges, and I promptly told them that no, that was not us trying to make those charges. What the f?! Thanks a lot, Tick Tock Ticket, or Tik Tok Ticket, however it was spelled. I couldn’t believe it. The other car in our party paid with cash for the parking, so we were the only lucky ones to get scammed. Jerks. Lesson? Pay with cash for little things, especially when you’re not dealing with an actual person for payment.

Second, Frontier Airlines officially lost my business yesterday. We had a 10:35 flight home from Denver to Milwaukee yesterday morning and were at the airport easily by 9. Plenty of time to check in and make our flight, right? Wrong! The check in line was wrapped all the way through the maze of guides and out into the middle of the ticketing area of the airport, and since D was traveling as a lap infant we weren’t able to check in online ahead of time to bypass the line. Well crap. We figured we’d have no issue, though, seeing as we were plenty early and things seemed to be moving fairly quickly.

However, when we finally made it up to the counter and tried to check our 3 small bags as we had on every other leg of this journey, the snotty Frontier agent refused to allow us to check in for our flight, saying we were within the 45 minute barrier when they close the flight. Um, what?!? You idiots made us wait in line for over an hour, with not one agent walking through notifying people that it was getting close to the cut-off time to check in for the earlier flights, like every other airline I’ve ever flown on does. You know what I’m talking about – the agent going through everyone in line asking if anyone’s on the next closest flight, and getting them up to the front to get checked in to make sure they’re on it. Apparently Frontier doesn’t believe in that system and would rather fly their planes half-empty instead.

So not only did she not allow us to check in for our morning flight, she wouldn’t even check availability on other airlines with similar or even close departure times. She dismissed that request with a quick, “No, there’s nothing else available.” Uh, I’m sure there is, but thanks anyway for taking those 4 extra seconds to check (turns out there were 2 other flights on different airlines with departure times close to ours). Nor would she take the time to see what our options were the following morning. Again, “No, nothing,” with an obvious lack of actually pulling anything up on her computer. So we were placed on standby for the 3:08 flight yesterday afternoon, with the chance of being continually rolled over on standby until the first available confirmed seats on the 8:51pm flight on January 4. What?! No.

Not only did we not want to spend 2 more days in Denver, but the Rose Bowl in which the Badgers were playing was on yesterday afternoon at 4pm CST! If we had to miss that because of Frontier’s beyond terrible ticketing agent, I was ready to throat punch someone. Ok, so we’re on standby, now what to do with our bags? One of Frontier’s saving graces has always been their policy of not charging you the extra $20 to check carry-on sized bags. Yeah, well, this girl obviously didn’t abide by that policy. She was going to charge us $60 for our 3 bags instead of the $20 we’d been charged by Frontier on our first flight to begin this vacation, since 2 of the suitcases were easily carry-on sized. Whatever. So we only checked 1 and the car seat through for free.

This is already making me mad again just thinking about, so I’ll try to make this long story short. After our disastrous encounter with the girl at the ticketing counter, we had to go through security 3 times since we forgot about things in our bags that were larger than the TSA approved sizes for liquids and gels. As we’d checked everything through the whole time up until that point, we hadn’t had to worry about that. Awesome. 1 time they made R pay to check his bag, but when I went back the 3rd time to check D’s, the woman was much more understanding and did not charge me to check the carry on. Um, how about some consistency, Frontier?

Thank god we were 2 of the 3 people who made it on that 3:08 flight on standby (D doesn’t count for a seat since she was a lap infant), and we made it home around 6:30 last night. Only 5 hours later than originally planned. At least Frontier does have the in-flight TVs so we could watch most of the Rose Bowl on the plane. We missed the very end on the drive home but tuned in on the radio, just in time to hear us lose. Ugh. Oh well, at least we were miserable at home instead of still stuck in Colorado.

So there you have it – beware of shady little unmanned parking boxes and Frontier Airlines’ ridiculously terrible customer service. You’d better believe I am filing a complaint on their website. We at least deserve our $20 back for having to pay to check R’s carry on, something for which we have never been charged until yesterday morning. What made me most irate about the whole fiasco was the ticketing agent’s attitude – she kept huffing and puffing and putting her head down on the counter in exasperation at how long the line was. Huh? That’s not our fault. Just do your job and get us on our flight! She obviously failed.

1 highlight of being stuck in the Denver airport for 5 extra hours yesterday? D was an absolute dream of a traveler, even taking an almost 2 hour nap while we waited.