This Just In – Moms Seek To Unionize

After hearing the news that college football players are seeking to unionize, Becky Potecky of Sleepless, PA, called a few of her mom friends and had a meeting with a local union organizer.

Her concerns are that her children benefit from her financially, and that she is treated unfairly. She’ll be looking for her children to provide her with six hours of sleep per night, a lunch break, and an end to verbal abuse, and rubber gloves.

Becky’s five-year-old daughter Madison sat down to speak with us. Actually she got up to dance around quite a bit.

Us: What do you think about your mom and her friends unionizing?

Madison: They already unionize every Wednesday night for wine and a “book discussion.”

Us: You have quite a good grasp on air quotes, Madison. Do you ever use sarcasm against your mom? Can you see why she’d be seeking protection from your verbal abuse?

Madison: I say I get unfair punishment when I sass her. My brothers and I should be the ones unionizing.

But the one-year old twins were unavailable for comment.

We asked Becky if she worried that her kids would fire her when they heard the union rumors. She said that’s a possibility she’s willing to face.

This Just In – Thousands of Children Understand Math for the First Time and No Pics of Their Homework Go Viral

Tuesday, March 25th, fourth grader Floyd Flugelander finally understood how estimation could help him check his answers, but no one thought to take a picture of his homework. Chloe Kaploey’s teacher Maria Padilla spent her lunch break facilitating a breakthrough in Chloe’s math skills and remembered to take a picture, but no one else shared it. Said Maria’s Facebook friends when I interviewed them, “There was just no punch to the picture. Big deal. A happy kid and a correct math problem. Where’s the sarcastic comment from the parents who could have taught it better? Borrrring.”

Other friends neglected to share Maria’s picture for different reasons altogether. Doug Badoogle said, “We just can’t encourage kids like Chloe to think that they can succeed. I say stick to the old teaching methods and let them sink or swim. See who’s really smart. Plus, if we let the teachers try all sorts of methods, they’ll think they should get paid more.”

I asked Maria if any other pics from her years of teaching had gone viral. “Yes,” she said. “One day, I’d been up all night with my grandma in the E.R. and I didn’t want to call in a sub because we had a field trip to the science museum the next day. While I was correcting papers before class, one of my students threw up on my shoes. I quickly finished grading her paper so her parents could have it before the weekend, but, my mind being in fifty different places, I wrote “their looking great” instead of “they’re looking great.” Her parents wrote ‘W-H-O-S-E teaching our children?’ on the assignment, snapped a picture, and the evidence of my grammar error swept the nation. Some people commented on the parents’ grammar error, but not many.”

Maria showed us her vomit-stained shoes and my photographer snapped a picture. We shared the pic as a tribute to what our teachers endure. Unfortunately, someone changed the caption and shared it worldwide as “How our teachers dress brings shame on America.”

Why You’ll Never Read Good Marriage Advice

Dear newlyweds,

If you’re looking for marriage advice, you have two choices. Long-married couples who have survived the inevitable challenges of sharing life’s decisions but can’t tell you the whole truth without airing their spouse’s dirty laundry, or divorced couples who are happy to air their spouse’s dirty laundry but can only tell you what not to do.

Knowing what not to do might help a little, but it still leaves you with countless choices of what to do. Not only that, but what didn’t work for one couple might work for you.

So you’re back to advice from people like me, who have found solutions to all sorts of problems, but have to relate them like this. “Well, we haven’t had that problem exactly, but maybe something similar. You’ll just have to trust me that it was similar, because I can’t tell you exactly what happened or he’ll divorce me for sure, and I won’t tell you which of us was on which side of the argument, but when something like that happened to us, we sat down and made a chart of what would be fair to both of us, yes well I can’t tell you exactly what was in the chart, because it’s super personal, but maybe you could make a chart that applied to what you’re having a problem with.”

Well, it’s better than this advice from a divorced person that I found online. “Find a person who accepts you for who you are and then says that’s not good enough.”

I thought that advice from the widowed might be a good third option, but even the widowed might be hesitant to give details about their late spouses. I googled around, and the only marriage advice I could find was advice for widowed people who are considering marrying again.

What got me thinking about this conundrum was the fact that our youth pastor just celebrated his one year anniversary, and when I thought back to our first year, the only problem I could safely relate about the issues we faced in our first year was, “We argued about which toothpaste to buy for several minutes before realizing, hey, it’s okay to have separate toothpaste.”

Profound.

But we’ve made it 17 years. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me for advice, and I’ll say, “Well, we’ve never had exactly that problem, but, well, here’s what I’d do if I were you. Not that my husband ever did anything like that, mind you.”

10 Reasons Why Handheld Devices Should Not Be Banned for Children Under the Age of 12

Occupational therapist Cris Rowan thinks that handheld devices should be banned for kids under the age of 12. Here are ten reasons that’s dumb.

1. Really? You want a law enforcement officer to have the right to ask you why your kid is holding your phone for you?

2. Who is going to be able to figure out the glitches for me if my fourth graders are not available?

3. Parents of kids with special needs JUST figured out the app that lets them stand in the grocery line without some old hag glaring at them about their ‘misbehaving’ child.

4. Really? You want a law enforcement officer to have the right to ask you why your kid is holding your phone for you? Yes, I know I already used that one, but I’m still thinking about how dumb this is.

5. My kid is not obese. TV is just as much to blame for obesity. Shall we ban that too?

6. Your claim that technology is not sustainable is moot.

7. My kid is not aggressive. In fact, I often wish she were more aggressive. Should she still be under the ban?

8. Really? You want a law enforcement officer to have the right to ask you why your kid is holding your phone for you?

9. See number 4.

10. See number 8.