Ach, my husband, who works in law enforcement and thus has shift work, had a major schedule change two weeks ago and I still haven’t adjusted to it! Pitiful, really.

62% of you feel that of course children have less freedom than we did back in the day.  Duh, Glinda.  Only 8% felt they had more, while 16% said it depended on the individual family, and 12% said location makes a big difference.

Today I’ve got a question about a mom of many who has been in the news lately.

79% of you are right handed, thus leaving the remaining voters as lefties.  Except, of course, for that troublemaker Sarah G. who had to go and muck up my EXTREMELY SCIENTIFIC poll.  Thanks for nothing, Sarah!

Ahem.

Today I’ve been thinking about the Occupy Wallstreet protests.

Good grief, it’s been a bit, hasn’t it?  Last week was fairly hectic, not to mention the Munchkinette having an illness that resulted in lots of bodily fluids coming out of her that, ah, weren’t really supposed to.  Poor baby.

Anyhoo, 52% of you rarely write checks anymore, 16% do it quite often, 28% occasionally, and 4% of you never have to write checks at all.  I wonder how much longer banks will be keeping checks around.  I imagine it is much cheaper to do it all electronically. 

As for today, the Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the largest in the county, recently voted to stop serving chocolate milk in schools.  This includes students who qualify for subsidized or free meals.  Ostensibly, it is to combat childhood obesity, but I wonder if this is just a proverbial drop in the milk bucket, so to speak.

All right, I’ve got a problem.

Well, at least both grandmothers think I have a problem. And when two grandmas think you have a problem, it does really become a problem in more ways than one, if you know what I mean.

I’ll cut right to the chase.  My daughter, she is among the teeniest of Teeny Manolos.

She wasn’t born extremely small, a bit less than seven pounds, a week before her due date.  She was breastfed exclusively until eight months, half formula and half breastmilk for the next month, and then formula exclusively.  I’ll write about my adventures in pumping at another time.

Suffice it to say that girlfriend isn’t really toeing the line in the weight department.  She actually lost weight from her 9 month well-baby to the 12 month well-baby exam.  She rings in at an unimpressive 18 pounds.  Which puts her in the 6th percentile for weight.  She’s in the 14th for height, but she’s never been past the 20th percentile in any category since birth.  Her doctor showed me her plot points on the growth chart, and she is advancing up the curve as she is supposed to.  She’s just on the lower end of it.

Developmentally, she’s right on track in every other way.  She began walking at 10.5 months, and can clap and wave and grasp small objects like nobody’s business.  She’s not talking in words, but her brother pulled the same crap, and didn’t talk until almost 18 months.  When he did, he spoke in perfectly formed sentences, so I’ll cut her a bit of slack on that one.

I would definitely describe her as a picky eater, and not a hearty eater, either.  I think our main problem right now is that she refuses to eat anything she can’t pick up herself.  She is so NOT ready to feed herself with a spoon, though.  I’ve tried and it just ends up in lots of wailing and teeth-gnashing and food on the floor.  She’s much too fond of flinging things onto the floor at this point.

I will add that my husband and myself, we are not small people.  Not in height, or at this stage in our lives, girth.  I’ve always been, ahem, “big-boned” and my husband is a former defensive lineman.  Which is to say, you would never pick a fight with either of us in a bar.  As for the Munchkin, he was always in the 90th percentile or above for height and weight as a baby.  He is now very tall and very, very slim.  However, both sets of gradparents, and great-grandparents, for that matter, are all quite small.  My husband and I are familial aberrations, if you will.

So, it has come to the point where one grandmother is offering to pay for specialists to run tests on baby girl, while the other keeps clucking and making noises about “failure to thrive” and that kind of annoying talk that implicates I am a bad, bad, mother.  Never mind that the child is as loud and rambunctious as any group of drunk bikers. 

Should I worry?  Should I call and order some specialists like my MIL wants me to?  Is it a grandma thing? 

What say you, dear readers?  The readers of the Manolosphere are well-known to be the sharpest crayons in the box, so I await your advice.

The man who jokingly tried to sell his kids on craigslist found a fairly unforgiving crowd here at Teeny Manolo.  With a majority of thirty-eight percent of the vote, you said that the police charging him with a crime was a bit much, but that he should never expect a comedy gig because trying to sell your kids for chuckles just isn’t cool.  Fifteen percent were fine with whatever punishment was meted out to him, and thirty percent thought the entire incident was just a big ol’ waste of time.

Now, it’s been all over the news that Santa Clara County in California is looking to pass a ban on McDonald’s Happy Meal Toys.  Not the Happy Meals themselves, just the toys, which they feel are contributing to childhood obesity by marketing the fatty meals to the most vulnerable of our society.

And I’m not necessarily talking about the shirt.

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.