This Bites

Tags

babies, biting, breastfeeding, jobs, teething

Oh my gawd, this child is being a real pill lately.

I assume that it is because his top two teeth are coming through, but not only has his sleep been haphazard and painfully short most days and nights, but we just had an hour long wrestle-session in which he repeatedly screamed for booba, and then immediately chomped down with his little white razor teeth the second I GAVE him booba. Then I would yank the nipple out of his mouth and he would wail heartbrokenly.

Aaaaaaaaargh.

Good news – that job I applied for a ZILLION years ago? Well, I finally have an interview for it next Wednesday! Now I just need to figure out what to do with Bitey McScreamsalot while I’m off at the interview…

New Post on World Moms Blog!

You can check it out here.

 

Babby Update: 9 months and pointing. With videos!

Tags

9 month old, babies, baby sign, child development, crawling, milestones, motherhood, pointing

Time tends to meld when you spend every day at home, like a hamster in a cage (although, as a nervous sort of hamster, I actually appreciate my cage and find it cozy and protective).

Going on vacation really helped put a time-stamp on a lot of Babby’s developmental progress.

I went to Nova Scotia with a baby who was 8 months old, clapping, but not pointing, who was not crawling, and only interested in standing.

I came home three weeks later with a baby who was pointing at everything while making little “ah!” noises, dragging himself around the house on one knee, and pulling himself to standing on every vertical object he could find.

The pointing thing gets a little funny. He points at everything that interests him (his favourites are lights, red things, knobs, and switches) but he won’t identify a named object by pointing.

Also, while I automatically name everything he points at, he’ll continue pointing, and then I’m not sure what to do.

“Fire extinguisher! That’s a fire extinguisher!

…Yep, that’s… still a fire extinguisher. It’s red! It’s… a fire extinguisher! Can you say “fire extinguisher”? Nice try, “gah” is close…

…Okay, that’s… still a fire extinguisher…”

If I can take him over to touch it (i.e. it is safe to play with and reachable) I will. But honestly, it’s like living with the ghost of Christmas Yet to Come the way that unwavering finger is always pointing, pointing, pointing.

He discovered the dimmer switch at my mother’s house, and is now obsessed with light switches. I can always make him smile by picking him up and letting him flick the switch up, turning his bedroom light on, and then down, turning it off. He grins and chortles with delight every time.

He has figured out the sign for milk (opening and closing his hand). I captured the behaviour by sticking a booba in his mouth every time he did it, and after a few experiences of this nature, he began to do it more deliberately. When his little experiments worked, by producing booba, he would nurse with his eyes wide, staring at his hand, opening and closing it thoughtfully.

So now he makes it ALL THE TIME while staring at me expectantly as his hand opens and closes, opens and closes.

Thing is, I’m not sure he really understands that it means milk.

I think he thinks it means Mommy.

Although since he probably percieves me as nothing more than a giant milk sack to begin with, it may simply be that the distinction is too fine at this juncture. He hasn’t picked up any other signs, and he doesn’t try to imitate what we do, either. He thinks it’s awesome when we imitate HIM, though.

I’m glad he’s finally crawling.

He totally figured it out the day after I made the post about how he had no intention of doing it.

It was clearly an accidental discovery.

He was trying to figure out how to stand up and walk, but discovered that one foot flat on the ground could propel the rest of his body along, and so that is what he does now. He treats his left knee like a skateboard and pushes himself with the right foot. It works, although when he gets going he begins to resemble a rampaging gorilla.

My life immediately got a lot easier.

He is now quite happy to move around a room, examining toys, putting dog fur in his mouth, playing with the knobs on his dresser and so on, for ten or twenty minutes at a time. Since he was already scooting around backwards anyway, things haven’t changed much in the watching-him category. The only difference is that now he gets where he wanted to go, and doesn’t end up screaming in rage from the other side of the room.

He wants to be clear, though, that he doesn’t consider this to be an ideal form of locomotion.

He loves to walk around the house while we hold his hands (although he’s still convinced that he would be perfectly capable of doing it himself if we would just let go of him) and he WOULD be cruising around the furniture if he didn’t keep letting go of the couch/table/parental pant leg and attempting to walk off on his own. He invariable falls over, which thankfully he usually finds hilarious.

In fact, after one failed attempt at walking away from the coffee table, he will often pull himself to standing and then let go again and again, for the sheer joy of landing on his butt and then laughing over the funniness of it all. I laugh too, and he thinks I’m laughing with him, but it’s also AT him a bit.

His top teeth are starting to come in, which is not helping the booba-biting situation. The problem with his nipping me at the breast is that every time he does it I yelp. He finds this hilarious and it actually encourages him. I always remove the breast and often plunk him unceremoniously on the floor afterwards, but until I manage to keep my mouth shut he’s going to keep nipping when he gets bored. Meanwhile the skin under my nipples is starting to flake and my boobas itch insanely all the time, probably from sheer irritation.

Itchy boobas aside, I am finding this kid increasingly entertaining with every passing day, and it’s killing me that soon I’ll have to leave him with someone else…

Two More Daycares (I think I’m in love)

Tags

baby sign, child care, cloth diapers, daycare, jobs, parenting

Well, our anniversary was a fiasco.

I was stressed out from another day of visiting daycares and fruitless job searching. The mix-cd I had carefully compiled for PH wouldn’t burn. I ran late trying to get the gift to burn and ended up running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to gather stuff for the sitter, and totally forgot a bunch of stuff.

So I picked PH up from work late, anxious, frustrated, and with no present in hand and worse, with no sleepy suit or sea horse for the sitter.

PH had clearly had a bad day at work. He didn’t want to talk about it. My stress levels were through the roof. I didn’t want to talk about it. We kept accidentally ticking each other off and having to apologize.

The movie was awful (Mr. Popper’s Penguins. It had some good lines and was cute enough that I could almost have forgiven it for having nothing in common with the book… except for the repeated penguin-poop joke scenes. I observed to PH that some guy must have gone home at the end of a long work day day and when his wife asked him what he had done that day, he would have said “I created CGI poop gushing out of a CGI penguin’s cloaca.”) and when we got back to our friend’s house we learned that Babby had been screaming pretty much the whole time and had refused to eat or even drink his milk.

They were hanging out with him outside because he didn’t scream outside.

All in all? It turns out that weekday anniversary celebrations leave much to be desired. So we’re going to try again on the weekend.

Now, as for daycare, I think I have some good news… but I want to hear your opinion.

Daycare Three

Distance: three minute drive from my house. The closest yet.

Caretakers: One, a fiftyish Persian (of course) lady who was a teacher back in Iran. Her English is mediocre (much better than my Farsi, of course).

Details: $40/day (she was vague about full-time rates). Lunch and snacks provided. The kids were sitting at a table snacking on crackers when I arrived, staring at Dora the Explorer on a strategically placed TV.

She has a website which had a clear gentle-discipline policy posted, and that promotes learning. She says that she has her ECE and teaches the kids the alphabet, their numbers, and uses a map of the world to teach them their countries.

There is a contract, and for a deposit she would “hold” the space for me.

One baby, one full time kid and several part time kids.

The daycare is relatively new, and has only had one inspection since being licensed, which came up with the following violations:

Code	Category/Description
203	Hygiene & Communicable Disease Control “Sanitation or housekeeping” does not meet requirements.
204	Physical Facility, Equipment & Furnishings “Storage practices of hazardous materials” does not meet requirements.

I liked:

Friendly, warm lady who gushed over Babby and whisked him over to the kids to say “look who will be coming!” She held him the whole time and took him around the room to investigate everything he pointed at.

Formal anti-hitting discipline policy.

I didn’t like:

Not only do they get TV, they get it twice a day – during snack time. The lady informed me that that was “all” because too much TV wasn’t good for them and she liked to teach them. Unfortunately, twice a day is still two times more often than I am comfortable with. Not so much for the kids, but the fact that the baby was sitting there staring at it too bothered me.

She was very pushy – she tried to get me to hand her a deposit to hold the space for her. Since I was still all like “oh hell no” about the TV, I politely declined, saying I would call if I wanted the space held.

She was more negative about the cloth diapers than the first two workers. Like them, she had very much a “but WHY?” attitude, but while they had seemed to shrug it off once I assured them that there would be no extra work involved, she seemed less comfortable with the idea.

I was disappointed by this daycare, because I had found the website very promising. I am also finding it very stressful to meet and connect with all of these women, knowing that I will end up rejecting most of them. I hate this sort of thing – meet them, talk to them, make friends, and then either never fulfill my promise to call them, or call and formally reject them. I hate having to pick someone, and I hate that I have to let the majority of these nice people down.

—

So it was with a heavy heart that I headed out to Daycare 4, which I had found by a fluke. It wasn’t listed on Daycarebear or godaycare, but its location near me caught my eye and a quick Google search with the name in quotation marks turned up a simple webpage with very little information. It styled itself as an eco-friendly “green” daycare, so I figured that this would be at least once place that might accept cloth diapering.

When I called, though, I wasn’t encouraged. I had to repeat “cloth diaper” over the phone multiple times before she could understand what I was saying, and then she said that they used disposables, that by licensing standards she couldn’t put them in cloth. I explained that I would bring my own and take them away and have them washed independantly, and she had said that THAT would probably be doable. I didn’t feel encouraged, though.

The problem with talking to these daycare ladies over the phone has been the fact that all of them have been Iranian. If you know anyone from the Middle East or India, you know that their accent and manner of speech is often clipped and hurried, and over the phone especially it often comes across as abrupt or rude by English-speaking standards.

I had been put-off by the phone manners of all of these women, but charmed by their real life counterparts.

So I went to go see the “Green” daycare.

Daycare 4

Distance: Near Daycare one – so about a four minute drive.

Caretakers: One, a middle-aged lady with two young girls who make up some of her daycare space complement. She is Persian (like all of them – is this a cultural thing, this Persian-daycare thing?) but in person her English is excellent. She is a nurse who decided to start a daycare when she realized that it would cost over $2000 dollars a month to put her two kids in care while she worked. She was friendly, chatty, and clearly takes pride in her work. She said she might be getting help in the future so she could have a few more slots open up.

Details: Rates are negotiable but trend at $880-900/month for full time care, lunch and snacks included. There are currently five children attending, including her own two, one of whom will be going to school in the fall. Her own children are 5 and 8, there is a 16 month old, a 22 month old, and another toddler (I didn’t quite catch the age) who comes part time. This means that the daycare is quite full, and she isn’t even positive about whether she will have a space in September. She says she needs to talk to the licensing board – with one of her kids going to school, and one of the babies turning two, she thinks she will be able to take another baby but she isn’t sure.

The children are allowed free run of the house (supervised) but there is a play room, a back yard, and a kitchen attached to the play room. The lunch menus are posted on the wall, and they included a variety of cultural foods, such as chicken curry, black bean burrito, and sockeye salmon roll. She told me that the food is organic whenever possible and that none of it is pre-packaged. She enjoys cooking and likes to prepare meals from scratch. She doesn’t believe in serving juice – she serves milk or water, but she has taken to making mango fruit smoothies for them occasionally as a snack.

Everything was very clean, but she told me that she only used natural cleaning products – no chemicals.

I liked:

Practically everything.

The lady was friendly, outgoing, and exuded competence.

She not only had a cork board filled with policies, weekly menus and such, but she also had a beautifully bound policy manual, printed in colour with clip art images (which her 5 year old daughter insisted on describing to me in detail: “This is a man. This is a woman. This is a doctor. This is a flower and it’s growing in dirt. This is mommy’s Allah-book. This is mommy.”) and it covers EVERYTHING. It is like she sat down and thought of everything under the sun that could possibly be related to child care and put it in that manual. When I managed to tune out the five year old, I spotted a policy on custody papers in the case of divorced parents, a policy on reporting suspected physical or sexual abuse and what constituted each, and an informational section on poisonous bug bites.

She offered to email me a copy so I could read it more thoroughly.

They don’t watch tv.

“His father” she pointed at the 16 month old “doesn’t want him watching TV, so we don’t watch TV. My kids do sometimes, because they’re older, but I get them to go upstairs, and actually since we don’t watch it down here, my own kids often go the whole day without asking to watch any at all.”

She LOVED my cloth diapers. She had never heard of a diaper service and thought it was a great idea. She was amazed at the price, saying that she thought it was still cheaper than disposables, and loved how eco-friendly it was.

She is familiar with baby sign language since both of the toddlers use it at home. “It’s great, the parents showed me the signs, and it’s amazing. They communicate with me, and they’re just babies! I love it!”

She also speaks in Farsi to the children occasionally “because it is good for them to learn other languages.”  I wish it were French, since that’s a national language here, but I agree with her that any language is good, and PH himself is learning a lot of Farsi, since he works in a Persian-heavy area (my area isn’t very heavily Persian at all, but apparently only Persians run day care here. Odd).

There have been no violations, but to be fair, there have been no inspections. She was just licensed less than a year ago.

This woman came across as so competent that I felt like I was inadequate by comparison, and that Babby would actually be better off with her than with me! I didn’t feel that there was a language barrier or a clash of priorities and expectations. I felt like we were on the same page. And she liked me, too, I could tell, mostly because I was patient with her obstreperous five year old.

I didn’t like:

She may not have space for me, and even if she does, she is going to need a committment from me, because her slot could fill up fast. I don’t know where I’ll be working or what my shifts will be, and she hit the nail on the head when she asked “So what if you don’t find a job in September?”

I could tell that she would take me in a heart beat if she could and if I could commit. But I’m worried that I may not find a job fast enough, even if she DOES have a spot open up.

(I’ve been job searching and job searching, but the only vets that are advertising are a) far away from me – an hour’s drive, almost – and b) vets who turned me down last year because of my pregnancy.

I plan on taking my resume around to every vet in the area in the hopes that some of them just aren’t advertising well.

But I’m scared. I need a job, and if I don’t find it fast I’m going to lose the best day care I have seen yet.)

Also, that five year old of hers was really something else. She started screaming when she saw me, “NO STRANGERS! I DON’T LIKE VISITORS NOOOOOOO!” and she hid in her room. Presently she came out and climbed all over her mother while her mother was trying to talk to me, insisting that her mother put her hair up in ribbons and then breaking into screams of rage when it didn’t meet her exacting standards. The mother was clearly frustrated with her and embarassed.

“I don’t know why she gets like this,” she told me, physically holding down the arms of the child, who had been flailing angrily at the approaching 16 month old, “she acts out for strangers lately.”

“She isn’t like this normally,” said the 8 year old seriously, shaking her head at her sister, “I don’t know what gets into her.”

On the one hand, I wasn’t impressed by her kid’s manners. On the other hand, it’s hard to judge someone based on the misbehaviour of their kid, because ALL kids misbehave occasionally and it often is calculated for the maximum embarrassment of the parent.

Also, at least she didn’t slap the kid or threaten her, although she also didn’t impose a time out or any other consequence other than speaking sternly and occasionally physically removing the child from a lap/from the other children.

Since I don’t have an obstreperous five year old, I’m not entirely sure what to make of that experience.

Daycare interviews day one – need advice from the interwebs

So, since I have difficulty relying on my own judgment alone, I am bringing a bunch of internet strangers into my decision process.

I went to see two daycares yesterday, and will see two more today.

Daycare One:

Distance: A four minute drive from my house

Caretakers: Two – a woman about my age and her mother, both Middle Eastern, possibly Persian.

Details: $900 a month for full time, lunches provided. Posted menu showed meals like chicken and rice, meatballs, macaroni and cheese, etc. The kids were sitting at a table snacking on strawberries and bananas when I arrived.

No contract, and they seem to have several spaces open so they were very “sure, whatever” when I told them that I wouldn’t know my hours or even whether I had work for a while.

Kids are all two-three, no babies currently. One of the kids (one of the only full timers there) has been there since he was a baby.

No outings, but a big yard to play in.

I liked:

No other babies, so Babby would have a stand-alone kind of status.

No rush to make a decision

Two caretakers in the household.

Unexpected drop ins allowed.

Latest inspection showed no violations.

I didn’t like:

Routine half an hour of TV a day before nap time.

Past inspections found the following violations:

202	Physical Facility, Equipment & Furnishings “Structural or maintenance or state of repair” does not meet requirements.
205	Policies & Procedures “Hazardous practice” observed.
603	Records & Reporting “Records regarding person in care” do not meet requirements.

Daycare Two:

Distance: a ten minute drive from my house, but along a main road (not hidden up in the subdivisions).

Caretakers: One, a fifty year old woman with 20 years of experience. I thought she was Russian from her accent, but her name is also Persian. PH, who works with a lot of Farsi folks, says that she’s probably from Northern Iran.

Details: $900 a month for full time. Lunch is not provided. One space opening in September, when a three year old goes to preschool and one of the babies (there are several) graduates to toddler status. The lady said that she isn’t in a huge rush to fill the slot, because I’m coming in ahead of most other moms – she’s getting a lot of calls, but all for immediate care rather than care in the fall.

She does have a contract.

There is a big yard and a play set for the kids to play on, and a lot of toys in the house.

I liked:

The lady herself- she made a big fuss over Babby and spent ten minutes on the floor with him, showing him toys and applauding every little thing he did, before she even got around to discussing the daycare in general. She was warm and very chatty, telling me about how her car had been broken into recently. She has run her daycare for a long time and says she runs into old kids, now grown up, every now and then and that they get excited to see her and hug her.

No TV at all, except maybe as a rare treat. “TV is not good for them,” she said to me, frowning (I phrase the question: “how much TV do they get to watch a day?” so that I don’t give away my opinion on the subject, which is that TV is from the devil). “They have so much to play with, so much imagination. What do they need TV for?”

Parental drop-ins encouraged – she said that parents often worry about how their kid is doing and encourages them to come by, suggesting that they peek in the window so they can see their kid without their kid knowing that they are there.

She had to cut the interview short, because she had to go do something, but she encouraged me to call her with any questions and to come by again if I wanted.

I didn’t like:

This lady has never had a violation-free inspection. The lastest one (in May) showed:

202	Physical Facility, Equipment & Furnishings “Structural or maintenance or state of repair” does not meet requirements.
302	Records & Reporting “Staff records” do not meet requirements.
603	Records & Reporting “Records regarding person in care” do not meet requirements.

Past inspections have come up with:

203	Hygiene & Communicable Disease Control “Sanitation or housekeeping” does not meet requirements.
204	Physical Facility, Equipment & Furnishings “Storage practices of hazardous materials” does not meet requirements.
501	Policies & Procedures Policies & procedures to guide staff action regarding “behavioral or discipline” issues is not appropriate; or not implemented.
502	Policies & Procedures Policies & procedures to guide staff action regarding “emergency or risk management” issues is not appropriate; or not implemented.
603	Records & Reporting “Records regarding person in care” do not meet requirements.

and more.

—

Both daycares had never heard of using cloth diapers before. The second lady said that no one had posed her with this question in her 20 years of care. The first daycare the older woman had clearly used them before, and she waved away her daughter’s confused expression.

Both daycares were cautiously open to trying them, but clearly thought I was nuts.

“Is… he allergic to disposables?” the first lady asked me, baffled.

Maybe I should say that he is.

I have two more interviews today…

Boy, this is stressful.

What do you guys think?

Oh, and it’s our third anniversary today. We’re going to go to a movie after PH gets off of work. Yay!

My poetry was pretty profusful back then.

Are you ready for the depth of staggering genius displayed in the following poem?

Get ready to have your mind BLOWN.

I am lost like a boat at sea

the Carol now never used to be,

well, that’s not true really.

I always have talked and been a boss,

but never before did I feel so at loss

well, actually:

I’ve felt longing for a friend. But that feeling did end.

Well, what I mean is:

I need someone  can count’n

though Shadow’s* friendship is profusful like a fountain…

Well, he’s not always there.

I am lost like a boat at sea, 

the Carol now never used to be.

Well, that’s not true really.

-Me, age 11

* my childhood dog

That’s right, folk. PROFUSFUL.

In Which If By Yes The Blog has a birthday, and Carol thankfully does NOT

Tags

blogs, time, writing

This blog is officially two years old today.

Is it just me or does it feel like a lot longer? And yet, the time has flown by between then an now. It’s very strange.

When If By Yes began I was renting, working, depressed, and whining about how I wanted a baby.

Now I’m a home owner (albeit of a musty, small, falling-down townhouse), looking for a job, anxious but happy, and whining about how I don’t want to leave my baby.

I’ve fancied up my blog theme a bit. Feel free to complain. If you all hate it I can always change it back. I”m still tweaking the background and such. How is it loading, for you?

As another part of my celebration of Two Years of Blogging On My Ass, I’m introducing a new segment to If By Yes:

The Early Writings of Carol The Genius

While I was home, I dug out some of “books” that I wrote as a child.

The first, written when I was in grade 4, is called Follow The Animals Home and chronicles the adventures of two Mary Sue characters who own a ridiculous number of pets and end up wandering around the wilderness around the Niagra Escarpment. The second, All That Glitters is a slightly better effort about a motley assortment of kittens, puppies, and a horse who go tramping all over the countryside looking for the “perfect owner”, only to be continually disappointed.

Both are hysterically funny, although I don’t think I was trying to be at the time.

I also found a book of my early poems.

Now you, too, can enjoy selected segments from these early efforts! Marvel in the genius!

Or laugh uncontrollably.

Whichever seems appropriate.

Shall I start you off with a poem? 

Canadians

there isn’t a Canadian that doesn’t feel for creatures,

not even one, I’m not kidding it’s really quite a feature.

Even people that start out shooting as a child,

soon realise there doing and become gentle  and mild,

with animals,

why?

– Me, age 11

Daycare? I call it SCAREcare.

Tags

anxiety, babies, child care, daycare, employment, GAD, jobs

My anxiety levels are through the roof.

I had a lot of anxiety while on vacation and I’m still having it now that I’m back. I don’t know if it’s generally because I’m coming to the end of my maternity leave or what, but today it is DEFINITELY because I’m coming to the end of my mat leave.

I started calling daycares today.

I’ve been putting this off for forever because I just HATE the fact that I even have to put him in daycare at all. In my mind, the person I am leaving him with is immensely fat, sits on a couch all day smoking like a chimney, and hollers,

“Shuttup, I’m watching my STORIES!”

All while my baby crawls around at her feet, sobbing, with his feet entwined by loose electrical cables.

I know what I want to a certain extent:

• I want a home-based, licensed facility. I don’t want a big centre because a) they are more expensive and b) Psychologists are actually concerned about disruption to attachments in babies attending those facilities. They’re fine for bigger kids, but for babies they’re a little too impersonal – too much staff turnover, too different from home etc. On the other hand, a kid DIED in an unlicensed facility just down the road from me and now there is a police investigation.

• I want a caretaker that I can trust and who can serve as Babby’s other attachment figure, the way a grandmother or an aunt would in a simpler society.

• I want someone who is flexible, because I may have to drop Babby off or pick Babby up before/after the traditional 7-5, depending on my work schedule (most vet clinic shifts are either 7 am-2pm or 2pm-8pm). Not to mention that I have no idea what days I’ll be working, or where I’ll be working.

• I want someone who is relatively nearby, since I have no idea what direction I’ll be working in.

This last one seems to be what concerns the daycare ladies the most. One lady, when I asked if she had any spaces for September, snapped,

“Where do you live?”

I described my general location.

“You’re too far from me. I’m in [she named another city that I live on the border of]. I know a daycare closer to you that has a space.” She gave me the contact info and rung off.

Another lady was more laid back about it.

“I’m quite a drive from you, but if you don’t mind travelling…” According to her address, she was only about 10 minutes away.

My initial search for licensed daycares consisted of a 5 km span around my postal code. I’m beginning to realize that this search was too broad, but I don’t know how to narrow it down. The government website that gave me the list seems to have inexplicably quit working.

I have two appointments on Monday to meet with potential daycare providers – both Persian, judging by their names, and both “quite a drive” from me, according to them – but I looked them up on the Fraser Health website and both of them have repeated violations under the inspection list. I don’t know how normal that is.

So, to sum up:

• I don’t know where I’m going to be working
• I don’t know what my hours will be
• I don’t know how to narrow down my 11 page list of potential daycare providers, given that many of them will consider themselves prohibitively far from me
• I don’t know if I will find someone I like
• I don’t know if I will find someone who likes me (somehow the “I don’t know what days/hours I need, I use cloth diapers, and sign language with my baby” spiel may not sell me all that well).
• I don’t know if they will be trustworthy with my baby.
• I feel pressured to make a decision quite quickly lest I lose a space, but am afraid of making  a decision TOO quickly and settling with someone I’m not comfortable with.
• I don’t flipping even want to go back to work at all. I want to stay with my baby.

Help.

"Oh boy, Mommy's going to leave me with a neglectful weirdo!"

The Vancouver Riots Weren’t About The Stanley Cup

Tags

hockey, idiots, news, riots, stanley cup, Vancouver

Perfect Husband went downtown for the game, but he left as soon as the game was over. Good thing, too, because I’m sure you have all heard what happened in Vancouver last night, after the game. All PH saw was a mailbox overturned and a mugging, but not long after he left, a car was flipped and set fire to, not five meters from where he had been standing.

When he got home we watched the news until nearly midnight, as people rioted in the streets and Vancouver burned.

At first I was disgusted with sports fans.

“I understand that they’re disappointed,” I said to PH, “but how does setting fire to someone else’s property make anything better?”

As I watched the live footage, though, I realized something – people weren’t doing this because they were pissed about the game. They were laughing, dancing, waving at the cameras. They were pulling ridiculous stunts, like jumping onto a flaming bimmer only to slip and fall right into the flames. They were taking pictures of themselves in front of broken storefront windows. They were watching criminals looting. They were beginning to realize that there was too many of them, and not enough of the police. They were realizing that they could DO ANYTHING, and probably not get caught.

And then we saw human nature at its finest.

What would YOU do, if you could do anything you had ever wanted to do, and you were sure that you couldn’t get caught? Would you run up a “down” escalator? Shout in a library? Break a window just to hear the glorious smash? Or grab an iPod touch?

A friend of ours was downtown and posted video of people looting. We can hear our friend hollering, in an amused tone of voice, “Seriously? What do you guys want to steal makeup for? Is lipstick worth going to prison? You must be REALLY ugly…”

They weren’t doing it because they wanted makeup, of course. They were just doing it because they could.

Most of us have a hidden criminal deep down inside. I didn’t even know that I had it, until I realized that the London Drugs that was being looted was directly across from the massive downtown Chapters. And I thought, “to hell with looting London Drugs, imagine looting a CHAPTERS!”

Of course, I knew that I would never do it. Even if I were in a crowd full of people and knew that no one would ever catch me, that I could do it with impunity because everyone else was doing it to. I wouldn’t do it because I feel that it is WRONG to steal. I don’t just withold myself because I might get caught, I honestly refuse to do it.

But the thought was there – the thought of how awesome it would be to have a freeforall in a book store.

There are a lot of people who just don’t do things like that because they don’t want to get in trouble, not because they have sat down and worked out the morals of it. When you remove that risk, when you put them in a place where everyone is just doing whatever they have dreamed of doing their whole lives, when you say, “here, everyone else is doing it, so why not you?” there are a lot of people who go “AWESOME” and live out their fantasies.

THAT is what happened last night. This wasn’t a matter of Vancouver being a sore loser. This wasn’t outrage at the Bruins.

This was just an excuse to be the complete and total moron that everyone had always dreamed of being. This wasn’t about sports. This was about people having a great time being giant assholes.

I had to laugh at the news anchors, because they kept talking about what COMPLETE idiots everyone was being, and they were right.

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch?v=PctPVoiB3v0&feature=related]

A Taste of Nova Scotia

Tags

food, mclobster, Nova Scotia, signs, travel

I feel like these images really get the Nova Scotia flavour across…

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