I don’t ask this lightly! This home is pretty amazing …and I feel I have to prepare you for it…
Don’t be fooled by the pic below…that’s just part of of it. 😀 All I’m saying is that if you want your kids to say they love you AND ACTUALLY MEAN IT, you need to be calling these architects pronto!
Take a look here and come back and let me know what you think.
If money was no object, would you build this home for your kiddos?!
I mean… I hate to ask and all that…but I really need it for this thing that is really really important. I promise you I’ll give it back ‘cos look I’ve made out a plan of how I can pay you back by next month. I really, really, really need this, it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity and if I miss this it will NEVER come around again!
Have you heard the schpiel before? Indeed are you the one with the schpiel?
I’m going to tell you straight. I never loan or borrow money from friends or family. Period.
The quickest way to gain an enemy is to loan money to a friend or family member.
If I have it and want to give it, you can have it. If you have the manners to pay it back, however slowly or in whatever amounts (within reason) then you can come back and ask again any time you need help. If you are a pig and don’t even get back to me, just try asking me again.
But I will never chase that money because I would never give what I cannot afford to lose.
Them’s are my rules. I’m interested in yours?
I was once helping out someone who I was really impressed with. They’d spent quite a bit of time in prison and having come out had put together a show and tell highlighting the stark negatives of prison life which they had begun touring schools with.
They had invited me to go along and tell my story as (hopefully) a counter balance to their own and as I had done the school tour motivational speaking thing many times before I was happy to freely give my time.
Then very early in the relationship I got the knock on the front door…
‘Um …can I come in? Sorry to bother you…um…I don’t like to ask…’
Me in my head: ‘Oh here we go!’
The story was they needed to pay a bill – it was very urgent…blah blah… can’t carry on with the tour unless it’s paid… yadda.
I knew that they were being backed by people who were handling the monies and other aspects of the whole ‘prison tour’ concept, so I asked why they hadn’t gone to the backers as it was in their interest to keep them on the tour. To be honest I can’t remember the answer because I knew it was BS. My brain has an auto-filter for BS.
But just in case their issue was genuine I told them that this is what I’ll do. The bill was £200? Fine I would help them with £80. They should then go and find the remaining £120 and hand it to me and I will ring the company and pay the whole of this bill via credit card then and there.
Strangely enough they never came back.
😯
As well intentioned as they might have been I could see from this and other things they had told me that they were not listening to their own motivational messages about falling back into old habits and avoiding prison.
Having been accosted only recently for large loans (plural) that ‘Honestly I can pay you back end of the month’ for complete and asinine frippery my gears have been grinded…. (ground?) I’ve watched many an episode of Judge Judy where countless friendships are trashed in court because people who thought they were helping out friends in dire need were flippantly told later in litigation that their savings or hard earned cash handed over to help their friend was a actually a non reimbursable gift i.e a legal get-out not to pay them back.
You know how when they’re begging for help it’s a loan and their generous friend is the GREATEST person on earth, but when it comes time to pay the money back their kind friend suddenly becomes Satan to them?
It actually disgusts me to see it, because the lender, albeit a little dim, has helped out of the kindness of their hearts and 99% of the time could absolutely not afford to lose the money.
Never a borrower or a loaner be the saying goes.
I wanna hear your experiences and what you learned from loaning money or your car, or your phone, gadgets or other things, because many people either return things broken and disrespectfully try and pin the damage on the lender or lose the item then go into hiding.
Plus what have you told your little’ uns about loaning money and things…if anything?
Or are you the borrower? Do you see money given to you as a gift or do you prioritize paying it back?
…to pierce a baby’s ears?
This cute little chubster is about to get her ears pierced. Isn’t she gorgeous and squidgeable?
The parents who took her to have it done say;
‘It was suggested to us that we pierce her ears early so that she would not remember the pain.’
Another woman who had her babies ears peirced recently said,
‘Did she cry? Yes for a split second. Do I regret it? No.
‘My daughter loves her earrings and she sees herself as batman with pretty ears. It’s much easier to get them done as a baby than when they’re older. Fact.
‘She looks beautiful in her earrings, and she loves to change her earrings when mummy does and wears all different ones.
How many parents force children to go through painful cosmetic surgery on the NHS for vanity reasons? Is that child abuse too?
‘Port wine birthmarks mostly cause no problems but parents choose to put children through painful laser surgery for vanity reasons. Ears pinned back, another unneeded surgery for vanity. If you declare vanity as child abuse, at least roll it across the board.’
Personally, I had my ears pierced when I was a baby so I don’t remember anything, but is that the point? The women above talk about ear piercing as though it is a necessary life-saving procedure. Surely if the child wants their ears pierced they will do it when they are old enough as they do with tattoos and cosmetic surgery? And surely with the first mom’s logic why not get little Bubba tattooed early also…remember when we discussed the mother that DID do that here?
So is this really at best a vanity procedure for the mothers? And if it is, is it okay as it’s just a harmless little thing to make Mom happy?
I’m not 100% either way on this one, yet I was very decided about the baby who was tattooed. We pierced chublings don’t remember the pain of course but why is this even necessary?
The baby does indeed cry for only a few minutes and with a few jingling keys are distracted and the pain is more or less forgotten pretty quickly.
Have you pierced your little cherub?
Let me know…below! 🙂
OR
See the ear piercing vid:
So…this 12 year old girl just ‘helped’ deliver her baby bro – you know…as you do! There was no panicked emergency that necessitated it, just a decision that this was probably the 3rd and last child that mother Zadyn Dellapena would be having, so…why not?!
Her name is Jacee and the doc, Dr Walter Wolfe apparently asked if she wanted to deliver the baby, upon which she was fitted with scrubs and the rest is internet history.
As you will see, she was not just pootling around in the room at the time, as kids might do at a home birth, she was all up in the business end of the delivery and was the first to welcome the newborn sprog Cadyn.
Look at her face though! 🙂
Loving the matching expressions!
Quite amazing huh?!
Well, this is it… It IS amazing, but I’m still not sure how I feel about it. Am I pro or con? I dunno!
Not sure how to articulate exactly what I have a problem with…not even sure I have a problem.
So I have to turn once more to you guys.
It’s natural you fool! It’s the greatest thing since sliced bread and all 12 year olds should be doing this!
Has that child got no homework she should be doing?!
Contact us here.
A tribe in Central Africa, north eastern Congo had a rather distinctive look. It involved binding the head tightly to deform it to a conical head shape as below.
A baby’s head would be tightly wrapped in a custom called ‘Lipombo.’ It would begin a month after birth and continue for the next couple of years until the desired shape was reached. The practice was seen as a status symbol denoting majesty, power, beauty and higher intelligence.
Perhaps surprisingly the practice did not necessarily affect the brain which is soft and malleable in a baby’s head and simply follows the prevailing shape of it’s container.
The practice began to die out as late as the 1950’s upon the arrival of westerners. It was also outlawed by the Belgian government who ruled colonial Congo at the time.
It is interesting that most images of this physical deformity are women. Although I have seen a few men bearing the conical head shape.
How does this practice strike you?
Think you would have taken part in this practice had you found yourself in this location pre 1950?
You must have seen the online arguments amongst the ‘breeders’ versus the non breeders.
Always somewhere in the debate a ‘breeder’ – let’s use ‘parent’ – will pipe up with ‘how selfish not to have children. You people just think of yourselves and no one else!’
Fair enough. But is there meant to be something wrong with that? If you know yourself to be committed to other things – even if that IS your own ego, why give birth to a child that is not wanted? Surely…surely THAT would be selfish? Or am I missing the point?
I think it’s part of that dubious argument about humans dying out if everyone chooses to be ‘selfish’ and not to have children, even though humans are clearly not all choosing to be child free suddenly and simultaneously.
Then we have a planet teeming with abused and unwanted children – (a winning argument for non parents surely?) One could argue that adding yet more children to the world is egotistical rather than shepherding one of those lost lambs into your loving home instead. If we are thinking about the world and the planet and the suffering of millions of innocent children in need of care, could adding (lots) more be described as the more insular and selfish act?
Perhaps indeed no one is selfish and the variety of choice is all a beautiful thing, but that word SELFISH comes up EVERY time in these debates and I’ve always wanted to understand why it’s the go-to word predominantly used by those with children.
Soooooooo…
I’m an idiot.
Is having children or choosing not to have children the more selfish act?
So singer Adele’s father who abandoned her at the age of 3 did the decent thing and came back into her life – once she was rich and successful – to build bridges. In the process of the bridge building he apparently decided to sell a story about her without discussing it with her and now can’t understand why he is no longer welcome in the ‘Hello’ household…and then went back to the press to cry about it!
…And then there was the father of a member of the pop band One Direction who – after his son’s success – decided that he urgently needed to be part of his son’s life and felt that the best way of achieving this was to apparently threaten to go to the press with ‘stories’ if his son continued to refuse to acknowledge him…probably not the best ice breaker!
A similar scenario happened to yours truly. After some national and international exposure (part of another job) my mother bumped into my errant father after decades. She told me that the wasteman had accumulated tons of press cuttings which he carried around in a briefcase and she saw them when he opened it to give her something. How did I feel about that? What an ass! Creepy eh?
If you won the lottery tomorrow or your book did a JK Rowling or the song, blog, cooking, sewing… whatever, afforded you sudden fame and fortune and you had an errant parent or other family member or even friend who you hadn’t heard from for some time come oiling their way back into your lives, what would YOU do or say? How would you handle it? Could you see things from their perspective?
Perhaps you are an ‘errant’ parent that did not bring up your children, perhaps you can help us (poor half-orphan Annie’s! 😛 ) to understand why?
