Minor Anoyances

 Since this is one of the few notable annoyances I have to deal with on any regular basis, I should count myself pretty lucky, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.


 That may in fact have something to do with the fact I haven't posted ANYTHING for a while.

 So here's a sort of open letter:

 Dear Lady at the Drive Through:

 If you don't ACTUALLY know the difference between "Hot Coffee" and "Hot Mocha" please ask someone near by. Don't just pour hot coffee into the cup and assume I won't know the difference. I will know the difference, I'll just be 20 miles away before I catch it, and then be annoyed that you were too lazy to check the big plastic chart that says "MOCHAS HAVE CHOCOLATE IN THEM. HERE IS THE AMOUNT OF CHOCOLATE THAT GOES IN."

 If I wanted coffee I would have ordered a coffee, it's freaking cheaper. Adding the chocolate probably would have cost you all of, what, five seconds? I'm amazed you got anything else in my order correct.


---
 Otherwise it's been wicked cold, and extremely snowy. We shoveled knee deep snow out of the driveway last night, and dang was that back breaking. We can get out again though, which is good. Although at some point I'll have to go clear in front of the mail box so that the poor Mail Lady doesn't have to crawl half out of her car to put the (junk) mail in, and so I don't have to climb through snow to get it back out.

 Also I think Plows have a secret locator in them that says: There is a person out trying to clear their driveway. Go undo all their work now. NOW. DO IT NOW.

 We'd be screwed without the plows of course, but I still think they have that ability. It seemed like every time we went out to shovel, there came the plow.

---
 In further completely random word-barf, I notice that since I became a Mother, I automatically bristle when I read someone online complaining that "ALL" children are horrible, ill behaved snot monsters waiting to destroy everything in their path.

 MiniMonster is a handful, but he's actually a pretty damn well behaved kid. He's only had one meltdown in a store, and that was because he was extremely overtired (and hungry), but we were desperate for a couple items. ((He was quite small)). He got kinda fussy once or twice, but again, it's always because he's been out long enough to start getting tired, and then he wants to be held. He fell asleep on his aunt's shoulder once, because she decided holding him might be better than pushing the cart. ((That was before she realized the cumulative effort of carrying around 20 odd lbs of sleeping, drooling noodle-baby.))

 So yeah, every time I see a knee jerk reaction, it makes me want to find the person and give them a good hard smack, because they make me think of the bitchy lady with her rainbow stickers, who scoffed at me for having my perfectly happy, well behaved kid with me as I left Dunkin Doughnuts. I mean how DARE I bring my breeding self to an moderately priced passable quality doughnut shop? How DARE I?

 Seriously people, before you hate on every single parent out there, remember that not all of us stepped out of a shitty reality show, and hey. Breeding worked for your parents.
 

Insane Products for Kids

Ok recently Grandma S., Ende and I went shopping, and we ended up trolling the toy section looking for stuff that might be fun for Mini monster.

I gotta add: It is RIDICULOUS how much stuff these days is almost completely battery operated. We are not teaching our kids these days to have an imagination, we are teaching them to hit a button like a monkey to set off an Rube Goldberg machine of reactions from a toy.

I just don't see how thats very educational... or terribly fun. You can't alter the pattern in which things happen, you can't make up your own songs on the little toy piano, the toy hammer comes with crazy musical sound effects, the big plastic safe set of cars and tracks is all motorized and mechanized and leaves no room for little kid "Vroom Vrooms"...

I don't remember if it was this bad when I was little but maybe thats why I liked stuffed animals so much. They're very 'make your own special effects'. ((On the other hand if I ever come up with the willpower to actually consecutively make kids toys and sell them on Etsy, I know there are probably at least five other people out there like me who want their kids to be able to play with something that doesn't require batteries.))

And then there's this article:

...I wonder about the world sometimes.