Mall Santas Suck and So Do You

Mall Santas. I effing hate mall Santas.

Perhaps not the individuals, who I suspect by and large are just looking to make some extra money and/or bring joy to children - but the whole concept of mall Santas in general is just... gross.

It's that time of year when my social media gets flooded with pictures of people's small children, crying their eyes out on the lap of a stranger - and every time I see it, it makes me want to puke.

And, of course, there are the captions. Not a fan of Santa, lol.  What? You mean to tell me your toddler didn't enjoy being thrust into the hands of a funny-smelling stranger in a cheap polyester suit while an artificially cheerful elf took pictures? How surprising (and sooooo funny)! Then there's: We were expecting him to cry but... But what? You're an asshole, so you didn't care?  The picture was worth more to you than your kid's comfort and ability to trust you? It may be time to face the fact that you're just not a very nice person.

I came across this gem today: It'll be a good memory.  FOR FUCKING WHOM?  Your one year old won't remember crying on Santa's knee (at least not this year) - and I'm guessing, if they somehow did remember, it wouldn't be something they'd look back on with fondness.  Ooooh, you mean it'll be a good memory for you.  I can just picture you, snuggled up by the fireplace* one Christmas many years from now, looking at old pictures.  "Hey Honey, remember this? This is from that time we gave Billy to a strange man and he didn't know why and thought we were going to leave him so he cried. What a great day that was." "Oh yes, Honey, it was the best."

I want a Santa picture every year.  Why?  What are you going to do with those (let's be realistic) seven or eight Santa pictures? Especially if your kid is crying in the first three?  Hang them on the wall? No, I know: post them on Facebook so everyone can see them.  Of course.  (Hint: no one, except maybe your mom, cares about your shitty Santa picture.  They'd much rather see a picture of your kid that was well-taken by a professional, or a candid shot of your child happy or doing something cute.  The zoomed out photo of your red-eyed, snot-nosed child crying on some dude's knee is not something any of your friends care to see.  Trust me).

I haven't even gotten into the issues surrounding mall Santas and older kids. The teaching-kids-strangers-are-safe, the lying to kids about Santa in general, the issues that arise when the mall Santa is a fucking creep (not saying it happens often, but it happens) - I'll leave that for another day (and possibly another Christmas).  Right now, I just want to mention (in case you missed it) that giving your toddler to a weird stranger and taking pictures of their misery as if it's cute is plain messed up. Please consider starting your own, non-creepy tradition instead.

*You know what? No. You don't get a fireplace. You get an electric baseboard heater. Fuck you.

A Short Post About My One Year Old.

The monster is one! It really is hard to believe.  I spent much of the day before crying, saying he was going to grow up and hate me, how he won't like me when he's a teenager, how everything was terrible.  Clearly, in the last year, my hormones haven't balanced.

As for how he's doing - he's great. Right now he's sleeping horribly and still refusing most solids, but in the daylight hours, he's a happy, active baby.  He's recently worked out how to use his building blocks and loves toy cars and stuffed toys. He's also a fan of pillows.

He pretty much never crawls anymore and has a pretty decent vocabulary, spread over two languages. He's growing up too damn fast.

I could write endlessly about him, but I'll have to save it for another day because we're travelling soon and his first international flight promises to be an experience (which I'm sure will be worthy of its own post - especially because I'm eager to find out what works to keep a one year old calm on a 9 HOUR! flight and will definitely want to share my findings).  So, I'm off to finish packing and running around and losing my mind.

The Soother Fairy

What the actual fuck?

For those of you who don't know, The Soother Fairy is like the Tooth Fairy, except instead of teeth, she collects all the soothers from kids too big for them, and gives them to little babies who need them.  Kind of unsanitary, when you think of it.

But really.  How many lies do we really have to tell our kids, to make their childhoods special? Shouldn't they be special because they have families who love them, fun traditions, the chance to use their imaginations and do the things they love?  I mean, Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy? That's bad enough. But now, things like the creeptastic Elf on a Shelf, and the Soother Fairy?  Give me a fucking break.

Are people really so incompetent at parenting that they have to employ fictional characters to guilt and scare their children into good behaviour?  Or are their family lives really that mundane that there's no magic in them and it has to be invented?

I know, I know, I don't have to tell my son any of that crap.  And I won't.  But, despite the ridiculous, but commonly held misconception that you're not allowed to have any opinions at all about how other parents raise their kids, I actually do feel bad for the children who will one day learn that their parents were full of shit and lied to them for years. I won't interfere, but I have a right to my emotions, and I will exercise my right to pity.

But, more than that, from my own selfish perspective, I can already imagine the shit storm that will rain down when the monster goes to school at Christmas time and says that his presents come from Mum and Dad.  I will be expected to encourage my child to lie, so that people can continue to lie to their own children unchallenged.  And when he (as I think most children who don't believe in this stuff inevitably do) he exposes the secrets of Santa or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy, he will be made to feel guilt for telling the truth.  That's just fucked up.

My First Mother's Day

Well, fuck a duck.  I went to bed at 10 because I just wanted it over, if that's any indication.  The highlight of my day was a little girl in line for the bathroom telling me she liked my hair.

Mr. Wolfman had to work, which is fine. I'm glad he didn't do breakfast in bed or anything, because he would have had to wake me up ass early, which I wouldn't have liked.  I'd been on the couch with the little monster since about 2am anyway, so I'd been sleeping pretty poorly for most of the night.

He didn't say anything to me, which is less fine, but I figured, whatever.  I think mother's day is a different day in his country (although, come to think of it, his mother messaged me to wish me a happy mother's day, so maybe not).

I didn't have much planned.  It was a beautiful day, and I thought about taking the monster to the park, but I figured it would be crazy busy. I sent my mom a happy mother's day message and she responded a little while later, so I asked her to Skype, but she was still out with her mother (I can picture her just sitting at the table playing on facebook, instead of talking to my grandmother) and would be home in an hour.  I told her to enjoy the rest of lunch.  I did not tell her I'd be home in an hour, but she assumed I would be.

I decided to go to the store and get myself lunch. I spent forever getting the monster ready, because he's somehow hitting the terrible twos at 7.5 months, and was having a meltdown every 10 seconds, most notably because I made him wear socks. I didn't put sunscreen on him, so by the time I realized that just because my mother was expecting me to be online when she got back from lunch, it didn't mean I had to be, we were already half-way to the grocery store.  I didn't want to keep him out in the sun too long, so I ended up going straight home after shopping anyway.

I Skyped my mom, said hello to her and my gran, then heard my cousin's* voice from another room.  My mom informs me that said cousin has come to take her to tea, and my computer promptly dies.  I get my computer booted up less than five minutes later, and my mom has left.

Ok, whatever.  So I feed the monster and putter around the house, generally having an unproductive, stupid day, trying to figure out what I want to do when Mr. Wolfman gets home. Because I'm ridiculous and a glutton for punishment, I actually call my mom back and talk to her (she says hi to the monster before me, and ignores me in favour of him for most of the call) and I don't tell her that she's just blown me off, mid-call for the 3rd time in a week.  There was also a lot of her going on about how they couldn't afford to visit this month like they'd hoped and a lot of what I can only assume were hints that they should stay with us.  They were horrible house guests last time, so I just agreed that it sucked they can't come now, but maybe in the fall and blah, blah, blah.

Mr. Wolfman came home during the end of this convo. and told me that his boss had invited us for a BBQ.  I asked if he'd forgotten what day it was, and was surprised that he hadn't. I told him I didn't think we'd be spending mother's day with his boss.

Said goodbye to my mom, finally got to use the bathroom (the monster had been crazy most of the day, and didn't want to sit in his playpen for any length of time, unless I stayed in the room and stared at him) and by the time I came out, it had been decided that we were going to this BBQ.

I didn't want to let it ruin the day, so I said fine, the only thing I wanted for mother's day was a family picture, so we were going to do that first.

Again with getting ready taking 100 years. The food I'd gotten for lunch made me feel sick, so I wasn't hungry, but Mr. Wolfman was, so he got food and then we got dressed, got the monster dressed, etc.  So the beautiful day had turned into an overcast day by now.  Or partially cloudy, I guess.  The sun was getting lower, but we apparently needed to go to the grocery store for snacks.

We get to a beautiful spot for taking pictures, then sit in the car and watch the light disappear as Mr. Wolfman eats the icecream he'd bought.  So, of course, by the time we actually go to take the pics, I'm in a shitty mood and the sun is behind the clouds and it's cold.  When it was still sunny, I'd dressed the monster in a cute outfit with short sleeves and I was wearing a dress that I bought 2 years ago and had been waiting for a chance to wear.

So we're standing around, in buggy air, horrible light, and cold.  It was too late when the sun did come out from behind the clouds, so the light was really harsh, and Mr. Wolfman seemed to think I should be shooting sunshine out my ass because we were getting to do what I wanted, so I said let's just forget it.

Mr. Wolfman was pissy because he said the pics we got were good and why wasn't I happy? I told him it didn't matter at this point whether the pics were good or not, because I'm just going to look at them in the future and be reminded how shitty my day was.  Wrong answer, I guess.  I told him let's just go to this stupid BBQ and then he didn't want to go with me like this.  But I told him we're going, and I'll pretend to smile and be nice to his work people.  As I see it, my day was already ruined, I wasn't going to let it be ruined for literally nothing. He said we would just go and say hi.  We were there for 2 hours.

The BBQ wasn't horrible.  It wasn't even remotely enjoyable, but I could have easily and happily withstood it on any other day.  The worst part was that the sun came back out, it got warm again and it turned into an absolutely perfect evening, weather-wise.  And I spent it listening to my husband's blowhard boss and his friends blather about nothing, try to give me food after I'd told them no thank you repeatedly and come up to me one-by-one to ask the same questions about the monster, over and over again.  Including what solids he's on, which is a major sore spot for me because, if you remember my Easter post, these are the same assholes who likely gave him the stomach bug which, a month ago, caused him to stop eating solids when he'd been eating really well. He still won't touch them.

We went for a short walk and went back to the car, whereupon Mr. Wolfman suddenly realized that I was upset (I told him I'd pretend to be happy for his work people and I had) and spent the rest of the night trying to cheer me up, and then being sad because I was sad.

That pisses me off. Like, I didn't give a shit about what you wanted to do today until the last minute.  Why are you so saaaaaad?  The worst thing is that he's genuinely upset that I'm upset, so now I feel guilty for being sad.  But fuck.

I don't even care about mother's day.  Not on the whole.  I think it's a dumb, made-up holiday.  I'm fairly certain that this was the only mother's day that will ever have mattered for me, because it was my first.  Because it was supposed to be some kind of... I don't know.  I don't even know. It wasn't supposed to be this.



*I don't talk to her at all.  She's never seen or met my son and never will.

This is Why I'm an Introvert

I went to a work dinner with Mr. Wolfman on Sunday.  The new owners of his business, a group of mostly-childless retirement-aged people, decided that Easter Sunday was a good day to get together with business partners and employees.  Since Mr. Wolfman and I aren't religious, and it meant I didn't have to cook, I figured whatever, so I went.

The little monster was asleep when we got there, so I parked his stroller in the corner, out of the way, and stood close by.  Probably ten times, various women either came up and asked if he was awake yet, or went and poked their head in the stroller.

When he did wake up, this woman, who I'd met when I came in maybe 20 mins before (and who I hadn't even spoken to beyond exchanging names) rushed over.  Then she held out her hands to take the monster from me.

I was so shocked, I just stared at her.

With her hands still stretched out, she said, "Oh, he looks so happy." and then, moving to take him from me, "Maybe he can come to me." 

I dodged her and said, "He's just waking up." Which was all I could think to say.

She stood there with her hands out until a colleague of my husband's, N* suggested maybe later.  Grabby Hands gave me one more pleading look, then got all butt hurt and wandered off.  

She was the worst, but everyone just kept coming up and touching his hands and looking longingly at him.  As a result, the people who I would have let hold him didn't get to, because I knew it would turn into a round of pass the baby.

The other weird thing that happened at the dinner was some weirdo trying to give the monster an egg to play with.  Like, an actual egg.  There were these loaves of bread as centre pieces with dyed hard-boiled eggs in them.  A new colleague of Mr. Wolfman's (not N*) who I hadn't met before pulled a bright orange egg, covered in bread bits out of the loaf and held it out to the monster from across the table.

I thought she was showing it to him, which I thought was weird, but whatever, I'm not going to police what someone shows my baby from a distance.  

Then she starts waving it around and going "Here, here" and leaning closer, so I told her, clearly, "He can't have that."

She kept holding it out to him, while N repeated that he couldn't have it, and said it was covered in stuff.  I probably repeated twice more that he couldn't have it, while she kept holding it out to him.

She got really indignant and said, "It's just bread!"

I said he can't have bread, or eggs, so she starts picking all the bits of bread off it, then tries to give it to him again.  My monster wasn't even remotely interested in it, or I would have said or done more.  But it was so weird, that even after I'd said no repeatedly, she just kept trying.  I learned in the course of dinner that she has a kid, so I guess that makes her an expert on what is/isn't safe to give to my 6 month old baby.

Eventually, N just took it from her, and put it on her own plate.

Chick got all sulky and muttered "Fine."

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I hate people.  I seriously need to dig out my mama bear and get her claws shined up. The next person who doesn't listen when I say no is going to have Hell to pay.