They banned tag!

Remember the game of tag? Someone would be tagged, they would be "it", and run after someone else to tag them and make them it. Apparently, this is a bad thing now. It's considered chasing and harassing to some. My God. I remember when I was a kid we would play tag. I always wound up as being "it" it always annoyed me, because I wasn't a very fast runner. Yes -- I would get pulled into the game without really wanting to participate, but the furthest thing from my mind was to complain that I was being chased and harassed.

It seems our general inflated sense of entitlement is rubbing off on our kids. How sad.

Blog about Blogging

Lately, I've been trying to catch up on posts about my son, Christopher. Recalling the various trials and tribulations of raising baby has been quite a chore. I forget many things, then remember them long after I've made the monthly update post.

I've decided to take a new approach to blogging: Write ideas and events down as they occur. Later compile them into a new post. I need a process for keeping all of these memories somewhere before they fade away into oblivion. Another thing I need to do is find some way of relaying things with more frequency than just once per month. So, in between all of that there will be intermediate posts that will not necessarily be about him, but about life in general. Ideas and topics that come to me. And a means of putting those scraps into the blog, then fleshing them out when I have time.

An observation ...

On several occasions I've seen these things placed in the seat portion of the grocery cart. It seems people these days are becoming more and more germophobic. Seriously, they put these on their carts to keep their precious little spawn away from any and all germs.

What they're really setting their child up for is being seriously ill later on. A child who is not exposed to at least some illness-causing agents will not be able to build any immunity. Using something like this really is a disservice to your child^1,2.

My belief? These parents fall into one of 2 categories: Those who are true germophobes who's cleaning-product shelf looks that of a hospital ward in charge of taking care of immunocompromised patients, and those who just simply don't want a sick, whiny kid with a runny nose, they also have similar shelves in their homes, sanitizer at every sink, and will generally sneer at you, should you get too near their precious child.

I don't quite understand this culture of needing to raise your child in a perfectly sanitized pristine environment. And FYI, those covers are likely to be even more of a breeding ground for dangerous bacteria than the smooth plastic and metal of a shopping cart.