this is a mini entry....just to remember something I don't want to forget.
we signed MLee up at an after-school program at the YMCA, which we (and everyone else) always refers to just as "the Y".
How was it at the Y today?
Do they do homework with you at the Y?
etc.
anyway, MLee seems to have misunderstood and now constantly refers to the Y as "Hawaii".
and she won't let me correct her. ;)
- Mom, am I going to Hawaii today after school?
-You really won't be going to Hawaii honey, but you'll be going to THE Y! It's called "the Y".
- NO, it is called Hawaii. TRUST ME!
she's driving me nuts with this latest line, btw. "trust me!" ... where does she get that from??
PS: you know, I've been trying to make this blog a little more anonymous by changing the names lately...but what the hell is the point of doing that if I keep on tagging my entries with the old (full) tags. ;) ....so, in case you haven't figured it out, yet, MLee stands for Maia.
Showing posts with label anekdotes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anekdotes. Show all posts
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
no it isn't my last entry
the last post was just to say goodbye to my old URL. this is my last attempt of trying to blog somewhat anonymously. truth is i need to write...and somebody needs to read it. why? i do not know. all i know is that I would like to be this person someone I have never met and will never meet. this is what makes it possible for me to write as openly as possible.
ok. now... here i am. sitting in the middle of a half empty room. the bed is gone. the closet has been broken down. clothes are strewn around the house. the movers have picked up our boxes on saturday and we have been emptying out the rest since then. here (in austria) you have to paint the apartment before you give it back to the landlord, so that's going to be my afternoon project. the car isn't sold, yet, and i think i got jerked by the car-dealer when he sold it to me (way too expensive and possibly being an accident vehicle). story of my life.
i am reading Paul Auster's Brooklyn Follies at the moment and there is a passage in which he mentions a troubling story of the Bible (well, ok..they are all kinda troubling...but this one I haven't been able to let go, since I came across it..).
" I was such a moral, upright little person back then. I never lied, never stole, never cheated, never said a cruel word to anyone. And there's Esau, a galumphing simpleton just like me. By all rights, Isaac's blessing should be his. But Jacob tricks him out of it - with his mother's help, no less."
"Even worse, God seems to approve of the arrangement. The dishonest, double-crossing Jacob goes on to become the leader of the Jews, and Esau is left out in the cold, a forgotten man, a worthless nobody."
"My mother always taught me to be good. 'God wants you to be good', she'd say to me, and since I was still young enough to believe in God, I believed what she said. Then I came across that story in the Bible and I didn't understand a thing. The bad guy wins, and God doesn't punish him. It didn't seem right. It still doesn't seem right."
"Of course it does. Jacob had the spark of life in him, and Esau was a dumbbell. Good-hearted, yes, but a dumbbell. If you're going to choose one of them to lead your people, you'll want the fighter, the one with cunning and wit, the one with energy to beat the odds and come out on top. You choose the strong and clever over the weak and kind." (p.53/54)
According to this sh*t I am weak, for I am definitely that kind idiot.
I have to go read the original now (well, not now...cause now I should go paint) but I will check the source and see, whether I agree with the above interpretation (or conclusions) of the story.
ok. now... here i am. sitting in the middle of a half empty room. the bed is gone. the closet has been broken down. clothes are strewn around the house. the movers have picked up our boxes on saturday and we have been emptying out the rest since then. here (in austria) you have to paint the apartment before you give it back to the landlord, so that's going to be my afternoon project. the car isn't sold, yet, and i think i got jerked by the car-dealer when he sold it to me (way too expensive and possibly being an accident vehicle). story of my life.
i am reading Paul Auster's Brooklyn Follies at the moment and there is a passage in which he mentions a troubling story of the Bible (well, ok..they are all kinda troubling...but this one I haven't been able to let go, since I came across it..).
" I was such a moral, upright little person back then. I never lied, never stole, never cheated, never said a cruel word to anyone. And there's Esau, a galumphing simpleton just like me. By all rights, Isaac's blessing should be his. But Jacob tricks him out of it - with his mother's help, no less."
"Even worse, God seems to approve of the arrangement. The dishonest, double-crossing Jacob goes on to become the leader of the Jews, and Esau is left out in the cold, a forgotten man, a worthless nobody."
"My mother always taught me to be good. 'God wants you to be good', she'd say to me, and since I was still young enough to believe in God, I believed what she said. Then I came across that story in the Bible and I didn't understand a thing. The bad guy wins, and God doesn't punish him. It didn't seem right. It still doesn't seem right."
"Of course it does. Jacob had the spark of life in him, and Esau was a dumbbell. Good-hearted, yes, but a dumbbell. If you're going to choose one of them to lead your people, you'll want the fighter, the one with cunning and wit, the one with energy to beat the odds and come out on top. You choose the strong and clever over the weak and kind." (p.53/54)
According to this sh*t I am weak, for I am definitely that kind idiot.
I have to go read the original now (well, not now...cause now I should go paint) but I will check the source and see, whether I agree with the above interpretation (or conclusions) of the story.
Monday, December 11, 2006
4-year old charged with sexual harassment for a hug
please please please tell me this would never ever happen in NYC:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/4392235.html
This is freakin' ridiculous!!!
What kind of educators are these people? He is 4 years old for Goodness sake!
sigh.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/4392235.html
This is freakin' ridiculous!!!
What kind of educators are these people? He is 4 years old for Goodness sake!
sigh.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
heart-stopping saturday
Today I actually wanted to write down how our Pisa and Florence Trip went last week but then Nayla drank some sort of poisonous oil and Maia got lost at one of the biggest markets of the year.
It all started relatively well. I woke up late, although not too smoothly,which always gets me cranky no matter how long I sleep. D took me out of a dream, which seemed to address my current self-reflection attempts. Just as I was about to figure out why I had to crawl through that tiny, stony, dark, and claustrophia-triggering tunnel to get to that huge (ancient) beautiful room (more like a temple-hall), Dario woke me up to get some. And he got some, alright. A piece of my mind, is what he got. "The ONE time the kids decide to leave me alone in the morning so I can sleep a little longer, you really had to decide to take their place and wake me?!?!"
I got breakfast in bed and that shut me up.
After a short heart-attack about Nayla having pulled out all the keys of my laptop's keyboard, I made a huge cup of coffee, which I just didn't get to and then proceeded to get the kids ready for our lunch invitation at my friend Sabi's house.
The meal was great, we had a nice time, decided to move on quickly to all go the big market in our village together. Apparently this is a yearly event and draws people from all over the state and even across the borders (Germany and Switzerland).
Before we left (and Sabi was on a tight schedule) I asked for just one cup of coffee. I had one sip before Nayla (now 2.5 yrs. old) appeared next to me with her mouth wide open and a certain guilty look on her face.
I saw a trace of brown above her lip and decided to smell her mouth. It reeked of some pungent volatile (essential) oil. The stuff you put in a tray over a candle.
I looked around and found a small, half-empty bottle on the floor. When I read the label, I tried not to panic .... which meant not to show it to Dario, who really is the one who always panics about stuff like that.
Keep away from children!
health-hazardous.
can cause lung-damage when ingested.
do not induce vomiting!
contains cassia-oils, which can cause allergic reactions.
etc.
I made her drink water, wiped her mouth with a wet towel, called my father (a doc), who wasn't home; we called Sabi's neighbor then (also a doc), who thank God was home and who finally advised us to call poison control.
I am not used to these kind of worries. Maia stopped taking choking hazards into her mouth when she was two (she understood ....or let's say...she adhered to the rules), and we were glad if she drank or ate anything at all. Nayla on the other hand - a great eater, which we are endlessly happy about - really does try anything, and that means everything. She is one of those kids you don't have to force to drink her medicine (when needed) and who you are going to have to keep the cleaning agents away from, for she will probably try it. The other day she traded a piece of candy for an olive. The girl is special, I tell you. ;)
Anyway, the lady from the poison-control hotline was very helpful and gave me a list of things to watch out for, none of which seemed to appear, thank GOD.
So we continued with our afternoon plans of hitting the market, leaving my full but now cold coffee cup sitting on the kitchen table. (This whole coffee skipping routine today got me to make myself a cup right now. ...probably not the smartest thing, given that it is after 10pm.)
We finally made it to the market around 3:30pm. Our little village looked like Chinatown today. Buzzing with people. We had a good time walking around, mingling, looking at all the stands, letting the girls ride on the kiddie-train and going up with the fire-engine's ladder ..or crane..whatever it is called. It was damn high, I tell you but the kids loved it.
After an hour or so we said Goodbye to Sabi and her family and decided to continue strolling for a last round before heading home up the hill.
Just after D bought his newspaper-rolled funnel full of hot chestnuts, Maia disappeared.
What followed was a search going from casual, to more intense, to near panic at the end.
I called so many people to help find Maia's whereabouts. I had neighbors go on a search around our house to see if she had gone home (by herself). I asked one of the many Djs to call her out missing. I left my number at the icecream parlor at the center of town, in case someone dropped her off (per instructions from the DJ's announcement). I squeezed through the masses, up and down and across, over and over again. I asked vendors to look out for her and to catch her if she walked by. I told Dario to stop calling me, for my battery was blinking low and I was waiting on call backs. He finally left the stroller on the side of the street and joined in the search, with Nayla on his shoulders.
After about an hour of searching without success I started to lose my cool. As I felt the tears well up, I took a deep breath and reminded myself of where I was: This is not a problem. This is freakin' Vorarlberg. Kids get lost and returned here all the time.
But the little paranoid mom in me kept on reminding me that this was still the 21st century and anything can happen anywhere. The likeliness isn't as high here and with this thought I decided to stick. It worked. I didn't lose it.
I walked through the bustling market one more time and then pulled out my phone to call the cops. Just as I was going to ask someone of the Austrian equivalent of 911, I received a phonecall from someone telling me that my daughter was waiting in front of the electronics shop....just a few feet from where she was lost.
I thanked whoever that was and bolted over there.
The couple (with a group of friends) who I found standing with her had apparently waited with her for the past 45 minutes and were just about to go to the police themselves.
I was so relieved I wanted to hug and slap that kid at the same time. I went with the hug and told her how much she had scared me.
I was told that Maia had approached the woman and had told her that she can't find us anymore. When she was asked where she lived, Maia apparently answered "in a cave". (whatever the heck that is supposed to mean.) and when asked where her father worked, she responded "in a cave, too." ;) ...hmmm maybe it's the way you get to our house...or maybe the fact that our apartment is very shady.....but I sure don't hope it's because of the fact that Dario has been super-lazy with taking them out these past two weeks. (I've been complaining about that already.)
Anyway, I am glad as I can be that she was o.k. ...and I gotta teach that child our phonenumber and address!!!! My neighbor recommended to write the kids' phonenumbers on their arms with a marker when going out to such places (full of people).
I told Maia, later in the evening, that she was going to have to remember our number and this way, if she ever would get lost, she would know.
"But I don't have a phone," she dryly said. ;)
It all started relatively well. I woke up late, although not too smoothly,which always gets me cranky no matter how long I sleep. D took me out of a dream, which seemed to address my current self-reflection attempts. Just as I was about to figure out why I had to crawl through that tiny, stony, dark, and claustrophia-triggering tunnel to get to that huge (ancient) beautiful room (more like a temple-hall), Dario woke me up to get some. And he got some, alright. A piece of my mind, is what he got. "The ONE time the kids decide to leave me alone in the morning so I can sleep a little longer, you really had to decide to take their place and wake me?!?!"
I got breakfast in bed and that shut me up.
After a short heart-attack about Nayla having pulled out all the keys of my laptop's keyboard, I made a huge cup of coffee, which I just didn't get to and then proceeded to get the kids ready for our lunch invitation at my friend Sabi's house.
The meal was great, we had a nice time, decided to move on quickly to all go the big market in our village together. Apparently this is a yearly event and draws people from all over the state and even across the borders (Germany and Switzerland).
Before we left (and Sabi was on a tight schedule) I asked for just one cup of coffee. I had one sip before Nayla (now 2.5 yrs. old) appeared next to me with her mouth wide open and a certain guilty look on her face.
I saw a trace of brown above her lip and decided to smell her mouth. It reeked of some pungent volatile (essential) oil. The stuff you put in a tray over a candle.
I looked around and found a small, half-empty bottle on the floor. When I read the label, I tried not to panic .... which meant not to show it to Dario, who really is the one who always panics about stuff like that.
Keep away from children!
health-hazardous.
can cause lung-damage when ingested.
do not induce vomiting!
contains cassia-oils, which can cause allergic reactions.
etc.
I made her drink water, wiped her mouth with a wet towel, called my father (a doc), who wasn't home; we called Sabi's neighbor then (also a doc), who thank God was home and who finally advised us to call poison control.
I am not used to these kind of worries. Maia stopped taking choking hazards into her mouth when she was two (she understood ....or let's say...she adhered to the rules), and we were glad if she drank or ate anything at all. Nayla on the other hand - a great eater, which we are endlessly happy about - really does try anything, and that means everything. She is one of those kids you don't have to force to drink her medicine (when needed) and who you are going to have to keep the cleaning agents away from, for she will probably try it. The other day she traded a piece of candy for an olive. The girl is special, I tell you. ;)
Anyway, the lady from the poison-control hotline was very helpful and gave me a list of things to watch out for, none of which seemed to appear, thank GOD.
So we continued with our afternoon plans of hitting the market, leaving my full but now cold coffee cup sitting on the kitchen table. (This whole coffee skipping routine today got me to make myself a cup right now. ...probably not the smartest thing, given that it is after 10pm.)
We finally made it to the market around 3:30pm. Our little village looked like Chinatown today. Buzzing with people. We had a good time walking around, mingling, looking at all the stands, letting the girls ride on the kiddie-train and going up with the fire-engine's ladder ..or crane..whatever it is called. It was damn high, I tell you but the kids loved it.
After an hour or so we said Goodbye to Sabi and her family and decided to continue strolling for a last round before heading home up the hill.
Just after D bought his newspaper-rolled funnel full of hot chestnuts, Maia disappeared.
What followed was a search going from casual, to more intense, to near panic at the end.
I called so many people to help find Maia's whereabouts. I had neighbors go on a search around our house to see if she had gone home (by herself). I asked one of the many Djs to call her out missing. I left my number at the icecream parlor at the center of town, in case someone dropped her off (per instructions from the DJ's announcement). I squeezed through the masses, up and down and across, over and over again. I asked vendors to look out for her and to catch her if she walked by. I told Dario to stop calling me, for my battery was blinking low and I was waiting on call backs. He finally left the stroller on the side of the street and joined in the search, with Nayla on his shoulders.
After about an hour of searching without success I started to lose my cool. As I felt the tears well up, I took a deep breath and reminded myself of where I was: This is not a problem. This is freakin' Vorarlberg. Kids get lost and returned here all the time.
But the little paranoid mom in me kept on reminding me that this was still the 21st century and anything can happen anywhere. The likeliness isn't as high here and with this thought I decided to stick. It worked. I didn't lose it.
I walked through the bustling market one more time and then pulled out my phone to call the cops. Just as I was going to ask someone of the Austrian equivalent of 911, I received a phonecall from someone telling me that my daughter was waiting in front of the electronics shop....just a few feet from where she was lost.
I thanked whoever that was and bolted over there.
The couple (with a group of friends) who I found standing with her had apparently waited with her for the past 45 minutes and were just about to go to the police themselves.
I was so relieved I wanted to hug and slap that kid at the same time. I went with the hug and told her how much she had scared me.
I was told that Maia had approached the woman and had told her that she can't find us anymore. When she was asked where she lived, Maia apparently answered "in a cave". (whatever the heck that is supposed to mean.) and when asked where her father worked, she responded "in a cave, too." ;) ...hmmm maybe it's the way you get to our house...or maybe the fact that our apartment is very shady.....but I sure don't hope it's because of the fact that Dario has been super-lazy with taking them out these past two weeks. (I've been complaining about that already.)
Anyway, I am glad as I can be that she was o.k. ...and I gotta teach that child our phonenumber and address!!!! My neighbor recommended to write the kids' phonenumbers on their arms with a marker when going out to such places (full of people).
I told Maia, later in the evening, that she was going to have to remember our number and this way, if she ever would get lost, she would know.
"But I don't have a phone," she dryly said. ;)
Friday, September 29, 2006
anekdotes of the day
today's anekdotes:
- Maia is way too aware of what's in style and what's acceptable - for a 4 year old, I mean - I cut her bangs this morning .. with a not too successful outcome. When she looked into the mirror, she started crying.
Me: what are you crying about? it's not that bad.
Maia (sobbing): I look like a handsome prince. I don't want to look like a handsome prince!
Me (trying not to laugh): understandable. ...but you really look cute!
Maia: I don't want to look cute.
Me: sorry, I mean - pretty.
to which she moved to the kitchen to ask Dario's opinion of her new haircut.
Me (calling over): Dario! Tell her something positive about her bangs!
Dario: uhm...it'll grow back.
Me: thanks. really not helping here...
********
This afternoon at work, I found myself in a situation in which I had to finally take Dario's old and always rejected advice from past similar moments of finding myself without dental floss. (..oh my God, that sentence was bad...)
I was so desperate that I asked almost everyone in my department. Finally I left the office with a sigh: What is wrong with you people. Isn't anyone here concerned about their dental health?
The real reason for my need for dental floss (after every bite of food) is the fact that I have a crown, which is positioned with a too big gap from the tooth next to it. It drives me nuts, when there's anything stuck there. It's not visible but I can feel it.
Anyway, after looking for some old people in the building (without success. damn online jobs. all these healthy teethed youngsters. nobody with crowns.) I finally resorted to taking an old advice Dario has been trying to convince me of: using some strands of my hair.
Bad idea. - I got rid of the worst bother but instead I now had hair stuck inbetween my teeth, which - I tell you - is at least as annoying as a food particles.
- Maia is way too aware of what's in style and what's acceptable - for a 4 year old, I mean - I cut her bangs this morning .. with a not too successful outcome. When she looked into the mirror, she started crying.
Me: what are you crying about? it's not that bad.
Maia (sobbing): I look like a handsome prince. I don't want to look like a handsome prince!
Me (trying not to laugh): understandable. ...but you really look cute!
Maia: I don't want to look cute.
Me: sorry, I mean - pretty.
to which she moved to the kitchen to ask Dario's opinion of her new haircut.
Me (calling over): Dario! Tell her something positive about her bangs!
Dario: uhm...it'll grow back.
Me: thanks. really not helping here...
********
This afternoon at work, I found myself in a situation in which I had to finally take Dario's old and always rejected advice from past similar moments of finding myself without dental floss. (..oh my God, that sentence was bad...)
I was so desperate that I asked almost everyone in my department. Finally I left the office with a sigh: What is wrong with you people. Isn't anyone here concerned about their dental health?
The real reason for my need for dental floss (after every bite of food) is the fact that I have a crown, which is positioned with a too big gap from the tooth next to it. It drives me nuts, when there's anything stuck there. It's not visible but I can feel it.
Anyway, after looking for some old people in the building (without success. damn online jobs. all these healthy teethed youngsters. nobody with crowns.) I finally resorted to taking an old advice Dario has been trying to convince me of: using some strands of my hair.
Bad idea. - I got rid of the worst bother but instead I now had hair stuck inbetween my teeth, which - I tell you - is at least as annoying as a food particles.
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