drowning

Thanks so much for your comments re Maddy getting bitten by another kid in her class.  I esp needed to hear "it's a toddler thing".  I was feeling horrible about feeling like all little boys are horrible.  I know it isn't true logically but my emotions run so strong when it comes to my little girl... 

BTW, she's been wanting to read "hop on pop" every night, which she didn't really seem to be partial to before.  There is a page in there where a little boy is biting the tail of a cat, and Dr. Seuss writes something like "don't bite him!"  Maddy forcefully says, "no!" in agreement every time we get to this page.  I think the incident is in her head and she's still processing it.  But it makes me feel good to hear her say this; it seems like a good thing that she thinks the behavior is a bad thing and that the book helps reinforce this.

I don't know about you all but I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed lately.  Not just at school, since the semester just started and we have so much new administrative crappola to deal with on top of teaching my big lecture course for the first time since Mads was born.  But I am also feeling really overwhelmed with the world at large. 

I am livid over Todd Akin's remarks.  Honestly, if someone is against abortion no matter what, I don't understand how they got to that mental place, but that's ok.  What I can't accept is that he thinks that women have some witchy secret mental power over getting pregnant.  WTF?  It's like jumping back into medieval times.  It's like the old practice of throwing accused witches into the water -- if they drowned they weren't a witch and if they swam, they were a witch and got burned at the stake.  So if you are raped and get pregnant, then you must have enjoyed it so it wasn't really rape.  Oh my god.  How did we get here?

Did you see this op-ed in the NYTimes?

And to top it off, not only do a lot of people seem to think his understanding of human reproduction is right, but he serves on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.  He is setting science policy for our country yet he is completely ignorant about human reproduction.  I can't even begin to express how upset this makes me.  How did our country completely lose rational science-driven logic?

Then this morning, getting out of bed to another f*&%$ing shooting with a semi-automatic gun.  Really?  How in the world can people be ok with this?  How many people have to be killed with semi-automatic guns before we collectively decide that this isn't liberty or freedom? 

It feels like our country is running with open arms back towards a time when mystical beliefs and violence ruled the day.  I don't want to go there.

Boys

A boy in M's class clawed her face and bit her arm today when she sat down beside him to look at the book a teacher was reading to them.

I am pretty upset about it and can't quite figure out exactly why. There are so many things. From not being able to protect her from mean nasty people like that to being pissed at how nonchalant one of the other mothers was who was picking up her mean little boy at the same time (likely the kid who attacked M, there are two rather angry little boys in her class). To feeling bad about disliking two little boys as much as I do and worrying that I need to figure out how to act about all of this in front of M.

What do you do in this kind of situation? Teach her to bite and claw back? Teach her to stay away and be afraid of mean boys? Let her see that I don't like those two boys? What do I say and do?

bain is the new bane

Is that right?  how do you spell "bane" as in "bane of my existance"?  Mitt and his damn Bain Corp came into my university and 9 million dollars later made us so efficient that it took  me 90 minutes to reserve a rental car using the new all-on-your-own online travel reservation multi step system.  Is that really a good use of faculty time?  I would look up how to spell "bane" but after my fun-with-administration day, I just don't have the energy to thus tax my bain.  I mean, my brain.