Scribblings

Black Bear Beeraholic

A bug invaded the house, not a creepy crawly spider or a silverfish but a viral bug. :p I think Billy really got knocked out by it. He hasn't eaten and slept practically all day. I have a milder version of it. I can eat but I was sleeping a lot today too. No surprise, I didn't feel like doing a lot of writing. I've been reading different sites and news and I found this which I find to be terribly hilarious. What a surprise to come back and find a black bear passed out after guzzling down the camp beer!

Oh Mother:

part 1 ~ Raising kids is a mother of a job.... Clearly it does take a village. And a lot of coffee. (Author Amy Kruse Rosenthal)
I miss the days of a village raising a child. When I was growing up, everyone in town knew me. Most of my relatives lived within a few miles of each other. My grandmother was around the corner and she was involved in the church and community. The other folks in town were either related (distant cousins) or neighbors. My bus driver was a third cousin or something. The man who ran the grocery store knew my grandmother. The effect of this was that there were a whole lot of people who’d be looking out for me. There is a feeling of security there.

We don’t have that kind of a society anymore, but we did have some community feeling when my kids were really little. We lived in Columbia, Maryland, a planned city with several villages. Each village had its own shopping center, place of worship, playgrounds, and schools. While we didn’t know everyone we did know a lot of people. Among those who knew each other, there was a similar feeling of looking out for each other’s kids. We were “friends for a season” – we were raising kids, and so we’d coffee klatch together and share our concerns. It was a big help – we learned from each other and drank gallons of coffee!

Now my kids are older and we live in a new community. We are on a “hello, how are you?” basis with most of our neighbors. There aren’t a lot of kids at this end of the community and I suppose that’s a big reason why there are no more coffee klatches. I think to myself, I was so fortunate to grow up in a setting like that and to have it while my kids are little. There aren’t any new moms around here for Linda to relate to. I am hoping she will meet other moms like her when she takes Tomas to the playground. For now, I think she’ll get her “village” online.

part 2 ~ A perfect parent is a person with excellent child-rearing theories, and no actual children. (Humorist Dave Barry)

I can remember how I thought and acted before I had kids. I’d see kids throwing tantrums out in public and I’d watch the moms deal with it. Rarely did I think a mom did a good job of controlling her kids. Some moms would give in and buy what the kids wanted just to shut them up. Some moms blew up and yelled at their kids. Some moms took their kids out of the store. I’m not going to be like that, I’d think. My kids will know how to behave themselves. Now that I have kids of my own I am so glad I didn’t foist any childless advice on the moms I saw. I didn’t know anything! As my father would say, “Now you know.”