Almost-miraculous: enough snow for a snowman in Knoxville, TN!
Snowman & photo by Almostgotit’s daughter
Archive for the ‘parenthood’
Almost the worst blogger ever
Almostgotit is going to get booted off BlogHer if she doesn’t shape up. She understands this.
Thing is, how many posts can a person write about her kid getting hit by a car while getting off a school bus? And how reporters and kid safety organizations suddenly want to make the Almostgotits their poster family for bus safety, and how can the Almostgotits say no when people HAVE to listen to them?
Because, you know, OUR KID got HIT. By a CAR. While GETTING OFF A SCHOOL BUS.
Oh, blogging. It’s always about obsessing over something, or promoting a book you wrote, or telling your whole boring life story which inevitably involves other people who may not want to get mentioned in your blog even if they deserve it, like the creepy Jason Mosier from Knoxville who stays up all night posting comments about children being hit by cars as they get off school busses and how natural selection should be allowed to take its course…
Not that I would ever mention that.
Anyway, my apologies to all my friends in blogdom who haven’t heard from me in a while… not so much on this blog, but on your own. Cause I know how much it matters, Being Heard.
Meanwhile, we’ve started woodstove season. Pulled out the crockpot for warm, autumnal meals. Become fascinated with stacking rock walls around new garden beds, and making hypertufa planters for next spring’s garden. Been trying out a new volunteer gig, so long as the unemployment rate is 10.2% and still rising. And on that subject, been clearing the air with some new ears about some old business.
Had a birthday, too: 29 AGAIN!
My 13-yr-old daughter assures me that there’s a strong association between an increasing number of birthdays and longevity, though, so at least there’s that!
“U were hit by a car?! Did u die?”
For me, it was mostly a blur. For the 13 year old, it was mostly about Facebook.
What do you do when reporting to the scene of your own child’s accident? I did it. I barely registered these peripherals: A firetruck. A police car. An ambulance. A school bus FULL of alert, chattering faces, all looking out at us. More firemen than could possibly have fit in the truck. A red car which was clearly the culprit. The dear bus driver. The neighbors who had knocked on my door. The sudden and miraculous appearance of a friend from across town, offering me a ride to the hospital following the ambulance.
My daughter wanted to use my phone at the hospital to Facebook her friends about the accident, and I didn’t let her, as we needed to be attentive and helpful to the people who were still attending to her.
But perhaps even more, I felt that Facebooking from the hospital was unseemly in a way I couldn’t quite explain to myself. Was it Inappropriate attention-seeking, when she hadn’t really been “harmed?” (but of course she’d been harmed. Someone HIT HER BODY. With a CAR.)
We came home and she immediately headed for the computer, and I heard myself telling her not to “over-communicate.” Then I realized I was censoring her, and for no good reason.
“Why not?” asked the wiser woman inside of me.
Why not let her reach out to her friends, immersing herself in a reassuring buzz of “Plz tell me what happnd!” and “I am so GLAD ur okay!” Why not let her tell her story over and over, processing it by sharing it? Why not allow her to redeem her own story by taking the lead in telling it?
So I changed my mind. “Communicate AWAY!” I said. “ALL you want to!”
And she did. She tapped away for a couple hours on Facebook, where the news was already spreading through Middle School Land. Several new “friend requests” appeared from breathless thrill seekers who wanted to be closer to the action. Chat messages bipped like popcorn from friends and people she hardly knew.
Was it unseemly? I decided not. My daughter was motoring along on her own power, getting what she needed, and learning she could at the same time. Why did she deserve it any less just because she hadn’t actually broken any bones?
And, as I reminded myself, there WAS hurt here. My little girl’s trust had been violated, her PERSON had been violated in a way she didn’t expect or deserve, by someone who had physically struck her with a lethal ton of steel. She had been exposed to a bus full of her adolescent peers who had eagerly watched her for 30 minutes in the immediate aftermath of the accident, some even snapping pictures of her with their cell phones. So why shouldn’t she re-fashion herself as a bit of a heroine? Why shouldn’t she even have, YES, a bit of a bask in her 15 minutes of fame? (She confessed, a couple of times, to wishing she had at least a splint…)
School the day after was much more of the same for her. Everyone was talking about the kid who had been run over… by a car? a bus? The nurse called her out of class. The principal called her out of class. It could have been awful, but my daughter chose not to let it be. And how proud my daughter’s friends were to know her, getting their OWN share of attention by bearing the much-coveted details.
On the bus home the day after, there was silence as my daughter walked down the aisle to her seat. The bus driver stood and gave a lecture to the kids about safety, calling my daughter ”one lucky chick” and describing how he’d almost had a heart attack watching her get hit the day before, and almost hadn’t come to work this day.
And when her bus stop came, there was silence again as my daughter got off the bus. She carefully crossed the street, turned, and waved. And the entire bus burst into cheers!
Cue the theme from “The Natural,” and Hurray for The Kid who Lived to Ride the Bus Another Day!
Child hit by car while exiting school bus. My child.
I am on my soapbox today, and today I am entitled.
My daughter was hit by a car yesterday just as she was getting off the school bus. May you never get a phone call like that at your house.
She is fine, thank God, but I hope you will hear three things that this Mom has to say today:
(1) Drivers must yield (which means STOP!) when a school bus is also stopped.
(2) Children need to be very careful when they exit a school bus, even if the bus has employed its stop signs and flashing lights. It’s important to keep re-enforcing these 1st grade rules, because even an 8th grader will be distracted by a bus driver’s frantically honking his horn at an oncoming driver.
(3) The degree of impairment caused by talking on a cell phone while driving, (even when using headsets) has been proven in several major studies to be the same as driving drunk. Driving with cell phones is not yet illegal in our city as it is in more and more others, but we don’t need to wait for a law. It is VERY IMPORTANT to limit this very popular distraction.
Thank you very much for listening.
- Almostgotit
What makes political jokes funny?
Source: CollegeHumor
Humor is highly subjective. I know this, but it still surprises me how often I think something is funny when someone else doesn’t, or vice versa.
It’s impossible to avoid the political world at all these days, nor the humor that goes with it. Personally, I think humor is one of the things that saves the human soul, and I’ve greatly enjoyed many of the political jokes I’ve heard lately:
Sarah Palin and McCain are a good pair. She’s pro-life and he’s clinging to life.” –Jay Leno
Q. Why did Joe Biden get a hair transplant?
A. To hide the mark of the beast.Q. Why is Barack Obama so thin and scrawny?
A. If he were any heavier he wouldn’t be able to walk on water.Sarah Palin right now is training for tomorrow night’s vice presidential debate in Arizona. And she says it has really helped her on foreign policy, because from Arizona she can see Mexico. –David Letterman
I’ve seen both of SNL’s Tina Fey parodies of Sarah Palin, too, and thought they were brilliant as well as funny.
The “Sarah Palin Disney Trailer“, however, I’m not quite so sure about. I doubt Sarah Palin was ever a woman who stayed at home making lasagna and sharpening her kids’ ice skates, for one. So why set up this particular image of her, and then make fun of it? What are we really making fun of: Palin, or stay-at-home mothers? Palin, or women who seek (or enjoy) power?
I’d hate to live in a world where it was no longer acceptable to make fun of public figures. I have never been a soccer mom, and never wanted to be. I think politicians are funny. I think people in general are funny. But making a joke of the skills and relevance of stay-at-home motherhood hits me wrong somehow, particularly as “stay at home mother” probably isn’t even a category which ever included Sarah Palin to begin with.
I am suspicious when something is so easy to make fun of that we change a real person to fit the joke, rather than vice versa. In other words, in this video, I’m afraid Sarah Palin may not be the real target.
Could be I’m making too much of nada, though, and it’s all just good, clean fun. What do you think, readers?
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Related Posts:
Sarah Palin’s email and a couple of goats
Palin V Obama: Which one makes me evil, again?
