Little Janelle

Friday 5: Re:

  1. What’s due for renewal? The cats just got another year’s supply of flea treatment, and it’s a little bit off yet, but we went with CHIP for health insurance for the baby, and I believe they re-evaluate things like your income every year. Our streaming subscriptions will be renewing for the month soon, too.
  2. When did you most recently replace something good with something inferior? It’s not quite a replacement, but a few weeks ago, a package of baby wipes got left in the stroller, which we normally leave in the car, but it got taken out to make room for recycling to drop off, and there were no other wipes in the diaper bag and we were visiting our parents. My husband ran out to buy some, and while I’ve found that baby wipes pretty much get the job done no matter what, I do prefer the ones we normally keep stocked.
  3. What statement did you recently have to recant? I don’t know that I’ve had to recant anything lately.
  4. What’s refreshed you this week? Oof, it has been a week. In short, one of our cats had to go to the vet and ended up needing to stay about three days and two nights, and although we knew he was in good hands and were confident he’d be fine, it was still lots of waiting for vets to call us with updates and let us know when he’d be able to come home, and even now that he’s home, we’re still keeping a close eye on him to make sure the issue that sent him to the vet in the first place doesn’t recur. So having him home was a little refreshing but still came with its own set of worries. I think the best refreshment is probably just going to be today–it’s the weekend, so I’m not working, and although that means my husband relies on me a little more with the baby so he can get work done for grad school, I’m not tethered to a desk for eight hours and we can all relax a little.
  5. What’s a fond memory you have of elementary school recess? Trading Pokemon cards before the school banned it, and I’m not even sure why it was banned but I went to a private school, so… and doing flips on monkey bars. There was a handful of girls who knew how to do it and would teach others, and I wouldn’t quite call it hierarchical, but there was definitely something to be said for what happened when you could do a flip with ease.

From Friday 5.

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3 responses to “Friday 5: Re:”

  1. Kimberly Avatar
    Kimberly

    My mother is a retired elementary school teacher so I might have an answer to your Pokemon card trading ban. What was happening at her school is that savvier kids were making very good trades, and then the parents of the kids on the losing end of the trade would call the school and complain that their child was ripped off and why didn’t anyone stop this trade? Teachers and aides were busy trying to make sure kids weren’t literally maimed at recess so they didn’t have time or knowledge to be the arbiter of trades. So trading was banned.

    Reply
    1. Janelle Avatar
      Janelle

      Ooh, interesting! I went to a Montessori school run by Italian nuns, so I think it’s a tossup–angry parents is entirely plausible, but there was also that “Pokemon is evil” thing happening in certain circles, which is apparently why my husband and his siblings weren’t allowed to have them.

      Reply
  2. scrivener Avatar
    scrivener

    I imagine anything related to keeping a kid’s bottom clean is rife with preferences, and it helps to have everything just as you like it, as much as possible. I mean, why make an upleasant thing even ever-so-slightly less pleasant?

    Fads cause fights, and schools find it easier to ban stuff than to moderate disagreements, which would teach kids to resolve differences. Most school principals are like this. I don’t blame them; they didn’t get master’s degrees so they could decide whose Charizard card is whose.

    This is why I thought the Silly Bandz fad was so great. Those things were so inexpensive that nobody fought over them. And kids who had more could easily pass a few along to kids who didn’t have any. I sported a few myself, passed along from students.

    Reply

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