Panic culture

You're all going to have to forgive me because I'm feeling a bit philosophical today.

(please forgive me, I'll change 'revelry' to 'Ravelry' later. Still using a very uncooperative iPad which thinks it knows what I want to say. Mostly it just points at the dictionary and picks the most bizarre fit it can find.)

I kind of feel as though we're living in a 'Panic Culture', maybe we've let our fascination with horror films permeate everything else in our lives, but we seem to love to panic, and we let others, like the press, play on this.

For example, Grandma S sent me an article on the spread of Giant Hogsweed, a nasty invasive plant that makes poison ivy look like a nice soak in a hot tub. It wasn't a bad article overall, the problem was that they were deliberately... I can't think of the word I'm looking for. They show boated. They showed a blurry photo of the flower of the plant which without context looks almost exactly like a nice harmless Queen Annes Lace, and only at the very bottom of the article did they cough up their sleeve and admit that these deceptive and lacy bloom spreads are the size of umbrellas. They also went out of their way not to mention the actual habitat that this invader prefers, the scale of the plant overall, or other details like the rhubarb red stalks, or even show the distinctive and huge leaves, all of which in combination make this plant resemble Queen Annes Lace only as closely as two random people with the same hair color might look alike.

While it's a horrible plant and should be handled by people who know what they're doing, a little extra information would gave pointed out just how EASY this nasty customer would be to see coming. It's almost less of a plant and more of a kaiju.

We see similar articles almost daily, if not hourly, where pertiant information that would change the entire context of a discussion is entirely ignored just to add to the sensationalism of the tale, and I think at this point the press isn't alone in this.

I had to cringe reading some discussions on revelry, since there was a young mother concerned that her almost three year old wasn't a big talker. Instead of doing legwork MANY of the suggestions that popped up heavily implied at being a delayed talker CLEARLY implied that the child MUST be autistic. This just not only isn't a given it's a horrible thing to imply, without verification, to a worried parent. It's almost tantamount to saying 'that sneeze is an major indicator for incurable pneumonia'.

As parents don't we have enough to worry about without modern updates to Old Wives Tales?

It can't do that, Dave....

So for those of yup who may have been wondering if I was devoured by a pack of raptors or sonething, I can safely say I haven't been.
The reason I've been totally AWOL isn't because of raptors, wild dogs or the bubonic plague, it's because of the damn laptop. For reasons we can only guess at... Well... I think we have a particularly reasonable guess... The charger port on the lap top no longer functions. At all.

We're going to have to go get a whole new lap top, and we haven't done so yet, so I am posting using an iPad, which while lovely for browsing, does get a bit awkward in the typing department. Especially since it really likes to autocorrect me, and I don't always notice when it's done so, leading to interesting substitutions.

We finally have our new queen sized bed and an awesome new mattress, which is awesome. Unfortunately, after the super delays, they followed up by being short the pieces that attach the head and foot board, so the bed is mostly complete, but not all the way.

MiniMonster as a result ended up accidentally dismounting between the bed and the wall, and needed a rescue. I've barked ankles and hamstrings on the handles for the storage drawers, but I'm getting used to them being there, and it Gives us some extra space.

We also finally got to repaint the bedroom, so it's no longer blue. Thank heavens!

MiniMonster is growing like a weed! He can, and does, handle his own spoon and eat yogurt, making happy sounds the whole time, and he needs another shopping trip for shirts that don't take a major war to get on over his head. This makes me nervous of the sweater I'm making for him, but if he can't wear it, I'll save it for NomNom.

He still doesn't use a lot of words, but he's getting a lot better at communicating, and arching him at all makes it pretty obvious that his small vocabulary doesn't indicate a small brain, and he's probably driving his Grandpa P nuts. Grandpa P tends to treat him sort of like a slow minded family pet. This is really annoying, but understandable in a way if you consider that he grew up in a situation where as a father figure he really didn't interact with his children much until they were older, so MiniMonster might as well be an alien life form for all my father understands him.

MiniMonster notices very much how he's being treated, and refuses to say hello to Grandpa P, though he gleefully says hi to Grandma S and her dog. He tends to be similarly recalcitrant with Nana J, who, I've noticed, is reluctant to surrender the idea that he can, and wants to, do things for himself, and tends toward putting him in situations where he has no control, like pushing his stroller through high grass, (I did check him for ticks), or panicking and taking away a plastic spoon (unbroken) which she'd earlier given him to play with, which left him both bored and stuck, and resultantly furious.

Must be kinda frustrating to be in those shoes, trying to convince the huge people around you to respect your mind. No wonder toddlers go through the terrible twos trying to remind people of this.