Will I get to stitch today???

Not picking your post out only, and I don't believe I even have to make this point, but the very first things my father, who raised me as a siingle parent, taught me was to take a shower every day, and always wash my hands before eating and after going to the bathroom. Then he'd check up to make sure I was doing that. He's say, did you wash your hands? Then I'd answer, yes. To this day I schieve leaving a public restroom afterr watching someone walk out without washing her hands. I don't touch the door handles unless I have a towel in my hand.

So, what I'm saying is, why don't parents make sure this is a preliminary function of being a lady or gentleman? Now when I walk in the Walmart or any store for that matter, I head directly for the free sanitary towels and wipe down the entire wagon where my hands will touch. I don't want one of those super infections. Unfortunately, my immune system is poor and I have hardly any platelets. It wasn't long ago I had my last transfusion.

Sory, ranting too long... v

It goes back further. Parents insisted on doctors writing prescriptions for the flu, even though bacteria are not flu virus and we've become expose now to many super infections.

"Karen C in California" wrote

At the bookstore, I had at least one mum suggest we need to stage a Back To School Shopping Cocktail Night for her. This was prompted by my finding out for her through our computer that the particular atlas her kid's teacher had specified and which she had already been to 2 stores trying to find was out of print. Perhaps the teacher had just been putting down the same thing for years--but never bothered to check. I also had a mum shopping for books for a University English class for her daughter, and again, 2 out of 3 were no longer in print. These mums were both shopping with detailed lists from specific teachers--

Dawne

"lucretia borgia" wrote

I don't disagree with you, and don't use antibacterial anything at home, but I do use a hand sanitizer at work, since I have to use a public washroom, use computer keyboards that dozens of people use daily, and sometimes handle money. My difficulty is that many of the bathroom soaps irritate my skin allergies, especially if I touch my face, so I use the gels. They are also somewhat less drying than the annoying hot air blowers that so many bathrooms have instead of paper towels.

Dawne

I use the hand sanitizers too. As a matter of fact I keep one in my car but more for convenience then for being germ free.

Being germ free has caused more problems then being dirty because today's kids don't build up a healthy immunity to what should be everyday, non dangerous germs.

Yep. My best friend in San Diego was a teacher, and when she did her classroom shopping in August, we knew she'd need two carts, so she'd always take me along to push the other one. OK, I'll put my own purchases in the baby seat of the cart and you can have the main part for your school supplies.

I got real good at picking up what she had put back muttering "too expensive", and as we were putting the stuff in the trunk, moving it from my bags to hers. My little contribution to our local schools.

And since I was mixing them in with the cartridges for my own printer, etc., she never caught me at it till she got home. Yeah, whatcha gonna do about it? You can't return them because **I** have the receipt! :)

Most of her students were from dirt-poor families (she suspected 90% of the parents were here illegally), so if she wanted them to have crayons or whatever, she had to buy them, because the families simply didn't have money for school supplies.

There was just a great letter to the editor - this being the capital city, we have no trouble getting hold of such statistics - that the schools and teachers union spent umpty-million dollars on lobbying the legislature, wouldn't that money have been better spent on school supplies?

Hearing from you-all that the parents are now being required to provide the paper towels and copy paper, I wonder how far that money would have gone toward the schools being able to provide those things themselves.

But then a whole bunch of overpaid lobbyists would have to go back to working in actual productive jobs.....

So there's no competitiveness that your pens are better than mine?

Personally, I liked to go with a different pen, so it was easy to prove "Johnny stole my pen", because I was the only one who used that kind.

Oh. I know it's at OM because that's where I go, and just assumed that it would also be at Staples, Office Depot, etc. (of which there aren't any in my neighborhood).

My ex-boss was banned from a friend's house for being a bad babysitter! Both parents needed to dash into work for something, and he offered to watch the toddler while laying in the hammock doing his crossword puzzle.

He came in the next morning and asked me "did you eat dirt as a kid?" Well, duh, we made mudpies and ate them, of course I ate dirt. And his mother said we'd all eat a peck of dirt before we die. Well, the friend's wife raised Cain because he allowed the child to eat dirt! Which had not been sterilized!!

No, the child did not have any bizarre immune system abnormality requiring her to live in a bubble to avoid dying of day-to-day germs. It was simply that Mommie Dearest wouldn't let her touch anything that hadn't been sterilized for 5 minutes in boiling water. And that dirt had been outdoors, where who knows what had touched it.

A friend's mother once observed that with the first child, she sterilized the pacifiers. By #4, she'd spit on them, dry them with a Kleenex and then put it back in the kid's mouth. By the time she got to #7, she'd just wipe the dirt off on her sleeve and pop it back in. She had better things to do than boil pacifiers three times a day. And commented that she thought #7 was the healthiest of the bunch.

My dear girl, what planet are you on? Most parents don't teach the little darlings diddly-squat about being ladies and gentlemen, only about being a world-class . I suppose I should blame the grandparents, because the parents don't know how to be ladies and gentlemen, either!

It used to amaze me no end, we'd have an office party in an expensive restaurant, and some of my younger colleagues apparently had never used a knife and fork before. I'm not talking about confusedly picking the wrong fork out of a selection of 6, but handling the utensils as if they've only ever before eaten with their hands. Oh, yeah, that's right, they eat all their meals at McD's and Taco Bell; they *don't* ever use a fork.

Ginger and I found that it did no good to simply glare at them when they committed a social faux pas, because they were quite sincere in their cluelessness "why are you looking at me like that?" (Not like our generation, where we knew EX-actly why the older generation were rolling their eyes.) and apparently be the first person who had ever given them any sort of etiquette lesson. (Yes, child, the word please has a use outside the phrase "oh puh-leeez". As in the sentence "please do not wipe your snot on your bare hand and then use that same hand to pass the salt".)

Must go along with the every child is a superstar and gets a gold star and ribbon for showing up.

Linda

I just turned off the news forever. According to our local stations I may be locked in the house for at least another couple of days. The water is going down but so slowly that the roads are still impassable and they're pleading with people to stay off the roads unless it's an absolute necessity.

Cars are getting stuck in the water all over the city and have to be towed, there are snakes and even a few reports of alligators floating happily around and kids canoing down our main streets.

I guess I'll be stuck in tomorrow to annoy everyone with my trivial notes in RCTN.

Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle in Port St Lousy, FL

Exactly how do you know what MOST parents do or do not teach their children?

Elizabeth

Ooo! Oooo! Annoy me! ME!

Elizabeth

Don't get me started on that one!

Boats R Us dot-com will be delivering to your house tomorrow. Did you want the basic model or shall I splurge on the Ark?

By observing the people around here who let the little get away with anything. Or, worse yet, actually instruct the child to say "FU" to the lady who is expecting some sort of apology for spilling something that will stain on her white dress.

It appears to me that more parents are teaching them to be punks than are teaching them to be ladies and gentlemen.

If they could slog their way to my house, I'll bet they could make a fortune.