Aaaah, ladies after my own heart! 57% of you never pay retail if you can possibly help it, and 28% say more than they would like, which could be that they don’t pay retail 8% of the time, but that’s still too much for them.  9% say quite a bit, and 4% of you say almost never.  I would say that usually the only thing I pay “retail” for is groceries, but I try to be a bargain shopper as much as possible.  But, I don’t clip coupons.

Now, I’m sure all of you have at least heard about the incident of Karen Klein, school bus monitor, being horribly bullied by some tween and teen boys.  I watched a bit of the video, but had to turn it off after just a few minutes.  People are calling for the kids’ heads, and Karen now has over $500,000 in donations to her name, as well as a trip to Disneyworld.  There is much debate as to who is to blame for what happened, ranging from the parents to the kids to the school district. What do you think?

I should have known there was going to be trouble because I had the audacity to go out. As punishment, my daughter decided she was going to be up from 9:30PM to 12:30AM, which, uh, sort of ate up my writing time. So, sorry about the lateness of the poll. It may or may not be particularly coherent, but at least there will be something.

Last week’s poll was a mixed bag regarding wedding vow renewal, with 51% saying it really doesn’t matter. 27% thought that renewing vows was very romantical, and 21% said that it qualifies for a big L on the forehead.

Recently New Jersey passed the nation’s most restrictive anti-bullying law, as explained here in the New York Times.

So there is this little tumblr creatively entitled Walk.

The entire premise of the blog is to show “how funny big kids look in little strollers.” Or at least that is what the (childless, natch) authors claimed when called out on Jezebel for being ah, a bit judgemental about parents who choose to place “big” kids in strollers.

I’m calling foul on this for a couple of reasons.

1) Don’t care if you are childless and having fun, somewhere there is a commandment that says “Judge not, lest ye find yourselves walking miles at Disneyland in their Nikes.”  Or something like that.

2) Did we mention that many of these pictures were taken at Disneyland?  Dude, when it comes to kids and walking around ALL BETS ARE OFF AT ANY DISNEY PROPERTY.  Period.

3) There are kids who look a lot older than they are.  Take my friend’s five year old daughter.  She is almost as tall as my eight year old, and often has people expecting her to act a certain way based solely on her height.  There’s also a commandment relating to books and covers.

4) The authors claim that they carefully “screen” their victims candidates for disabilties, by you, know, looking at them. Because we all know how easy it is to recognize a disability just by looking at someone.

I think what saddens me the most is that they have over a thousand likes on Facebook. 

Hide behind the all in good fun excuse all you like, but I think this is just plain mean.

I had candy on the brain last week, and so asked for your favorite. It was not too surprising that two chocolate choices tied for first, one being chocolate-only, the other being something chocolate, with nuts, and chewy. That last bunch is hard to please. I know this because I belong to it. Black licorice made a surprisingly strong showing with six percent of the vote, and chocolate and nuts garnered eighteen percent. Sorry, I’m having a hard time focusing with all this talk of chocolate.

Today I want to ask about something that’s been on my mind lately, and that is school bullying. It can be any kind, as I feel verbal abuse is just as bad as physical abuse. My son has been a victim of bullying twice, once in pre-K and once in first grade. The pre-K bullying was from his classmates, and the first grade bully experience was from a third grader. Each time, the supposed “playground monitors” didn’t do jack to help him. Nor did his pre-K teacher, who chalked it up to boys being boys. Uh huh.

One of the Munchkin’s oldest and best friends is a girl.

Well, was one of his best friends.

I’ll get to that in a moment.

They attended the same preschool, kindergarten, and are currently at the same school for first grade, although not in the same class.  They’ve been to each other’s houses for birthday parties, gone to the movies together, had playdates galore, gone trick or treating together, and basically hung out like good friends do.

The other day I asked him how Jessica* was doing. 

“Oh, we’re not friends anymore.”

Wait, what?

When pressed for details, he explained to me that both of them are being teased by people calling them “boyfriend” and “girlfriend,” girls are the anti-christ, yadda yadda yadda.

In the first grade? Already?

I knew that at some point some kids would say something similar, but I didn’t expect it until much later.

Silly, stupid me.

Don’t I know that kids are becoming mini-adults at an ever earlier age?

When I was in first grade, I’m not sure I even knew what a “boyfriend” was.  And I had a very good friend who happened to be a boy, and it wasn’t until middle school where things got a bit awkward and we kind of went our separate ways, but with no bad feelings.  But then again, I”ve been told that I was quite sheltered as a youth. 

So, what’s next?

Do I tell him to shrug off what is apparently some pretty serious peer pressure?  Do I condone only being friends outside of school, and pretending at school that they aren’t?  Or do I just let the drama play out as it will and not be a helicopter parent?

But I sure do have a strong desire to fire up those blades right about now.

*not her real name, obviously

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Oh hai.

I don’t know if you noticed my absence during all of last week, but I was busy being given a delicious solution of dextrose solution and antibiotics via IV in my prison hospital room. It was four days of no food and hoping it would relax my irritable gall bladder, or else go into surgery and possibly trigger preterm labor at 31 weeks. Fun times my friends, fun times!

But I’m back and on some sort of low-fat diet that really isn’t all that bad, hoping that another attack does not occur until I’m at least 36 weeks. Else they will probably check my butt back into the hospital and that would make me an extremely crabby person, to say the least. But trust me when I say there is no food tempting enough to risk having all that happen again.

All right, onwards and upwards!

For last week’s poll, the majority of you stated that you aren’t even capable of looking towards the holidays yet, it’s just one day at a time. I hear you sistas, I hear you.

As for today, perhaps you haven’t yet heard of Kanye West completely dissing 17 year old Taylor Swift at the VMA’s. What say you about this incident?

The latest news in promoting a “green” lifestyle says that to truly make the biggest impact, don’t have any kids.

Well, they say, have fewer kids, but what exactly is the definition of “fewer?” For people like the Duggars, fewer would qualify as twelve. For people such as myself, fewer equals only one. And for others who only want one, that would mean zero.

Is this the latest ploy to make people feel guilty for having kids? There seems to be a large anti-kid contingent around lately, ranging from those who think kids have no place in a restaurant that doesn’t have a drink dispensing machine, to this article purporting we could save the planet if we all just went away.

I understand the point they are making, that obviously less people on the planet correlates to less greenhouse emissions and use of resources, simply because there wouldn’t be as many beings to emit the gases and use the resources in the first place. Completely logical, Mr. Spock.

However, in most First World nations, the birth rate is already declining.  It is the developing countries who still have the higher birth rates, and I think that the ultimate way to decrease population growth is actually to make those countries prosper more. 

I do consider myself a fairly liberal person, but the idea of limiting children, when there are so many other things that could be done first, sort of boggles my mind.

Coulrophobia, for those of you who may not be familiar with the term, is the fear of clowns.

In this shocking video we see irrefutable proof that even the most fearsome and powerful of human beings is capable of being brought to his/her knees by the mere approach of one of these hideous, grinning homunculi.

Even John Gotti.

From Spy magazine’s doomed tv show, via Gawker