Kids Are Best When Sautéed
(Unless They are Close Friends')
OK, I realise that my feelings about kids are fairly plain. I have never made a secret of it and never pulled my punches about how much other people's kids bother me. It is NOT a flaw thing or a blame thing (although the gods' know that there are plenty of poorly behaved kids thanks to lousy parents!). It is simply a matter of kids - normal kids - just getting on my nerves. I was a kid, too, and undoubtedly got on people's nerves and would absolutely have made me the adult just as crazy as any kid would! I just have zero ability to put up with perfectly normal, well-behaved kids. We'll touch on bad kids or poorly behaved kids later.
When my friends have children, as they are doing now, it is a wholly different thing. Sure, they still might annoy me but not nearly as much as just any kid that I don't know would. I enjoyed my pen friend’s son and daughter in New Hampshire and I love Matthew. Stephanos is special, too. I feel that way about the R&R Chief's kids, too. These are my close friends' children and that makes a world of difference.
With Flyboy and Quilt Queen, it is much more special that almost anyone, as we have been friends for years with Flyboy. His child is super-special to me. And at one point she had asked why I am taking such an interest in Matthew and I replied, "It's a completely different thing. I still don't care for kids, but Matthew isn't just any child, he's your child!"
If you are wondering why I make exceptions for a small select group of kids, this is it.
Now, as for poorly behaved kids... this is not the child's fault! Children need supervision and constant praise and rewarding for good behaviour and reinforcement and punishment for poor or naughty behaviour. If a parent is lax in doing this, the child is quick to take advantage of this. Who wouldn't? Adults will do it to - push the envelope as far as they can. Test the boundaries. Whatever you want to call it.
Certain behaviours are universally unacceptable:
1. Whining
2. Pinching/hitting/rough physical behaviour
3. Shouting
4. Cursing or poor use of language
However, certain sayings & forms of thinking are also (to me) unacceptable: (I will discuss below)
1. "Spare the rod, spoil the child" (I have an exceptional poor opinion of anyone striking their children in any fashion)
2. "Children should be seen and not heard" (if you believe that, you definitely shouldn't have kids)
3. Presenting a united front - not a saying but a thing that parents practice - bad idea
4. Others saying you should have children because fill in the blank. (The green section is devoted to just this.)
(I'm sure that there are other sayings & tidbits of bed thinking that I cannot think of that are just as odious as those above...)
1. There are plenty of perfectly terrible parents around - more than are good. I don't agree with ever hitting your kids. I know they'll make any adult crazy - fairly often, too - but my parents never ever struck me (no comments from the peanut gallery, please! [grin]). I wasn't a perfect kid and any0ne who tells you that they have a perfect child that never did anything wrong is absolutely lying through their pearly whites! But hitting would not have made me a better kid. My parents also made it very clear to my grandparents that corporal punishment would not be tolerated. Whatever low opinion my grandmother had of that rule, she was intelligent enough to know that one strike is all she would get before my mother pulled the plug on her seeing me.
2. Children should be seen and not heard. I guess in a perfect world infants, babies, toddlers and kids would not scream, cry, carry on, throw fits, and try out their voices. However, kids are by nature loud. Certainly infants and babies are. They have no other recourse but to cry - they can't communicate otherwise. No one's super-precocious 6-month-old can sit up and say, "Hey, there, Mummy, what is up with this diaper?" or "Listen, the tummy is a-rumbling, when's chow-time?" They can only cry. On the other hand, when they have just been fed, the diaper is clean and there is nothing else obviously wrong, put the kid down and let him or her cry it out.
3. The United Front form of Parenting: This is a big thing that many parents do but mine did not. If they disagreed on something, they would discuss it and sometimes I would be granted the request and other times not. Or sometimes I got a reprieve on something and sometimes I didn't. But it was nice that there was sometimes someone in my corner fighting for me instead of always forming that us against the kid thing. I hate that. And I don't know a kid in the world that did not wonder why the parents were always out to get him or her or against him or her.
4. You should have children because fill in the blank.
Are you ready for this, patient reader? Oh, yes, it is a lengthy list!
OK. Reason #1: You are not a "real" woman until you have children.
Would you believe my first HR manager told me this? I wouldn't... certainly not from someone who, in all other ways, was a very intelligent, earthy, caring person. But she actually told me that. I guess she was thinking that no matter what I thought about having kids then, I would change my mind and eventually become that real woman. I still find that my response today is the same as it was seven years ago... I looked down at my C-cup chest, looked up, and replied, "I am a real woman. This chest is the give-away."
Reason #2: Who will take care of you in your old age?
Considering the source of this infamous reason, I should have seen it coming when Luis Sr. moved in with us. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me! He used to say this all the time. And I always wondered why anyone has kids under this misguided thinking. I am not bringing lives into this world with the idea that they should "owe" me anything. Apparently, however, many people including Luis' father, feel that their progeny are, in fact, indentured servants of a sort. Terrible. Talk about the ultimate in self-serving, completely selfish behaviour. And now that Luis Sr. lives with us, he is discovering daily that we emphatically do not agree with his view of what life with his kids would be like. Surprise!
Reason #3: You need someone to carry on the family name/family line.
That would go along with the family genes: the heart failure history, the cancer history, the Alzheimer’s history. My mother seems to constantly be apologising for all the maladies that she knows has been passed on to me. This is not her fault - no one thinks of this when they have kids - but there you have it. I inherited a name that I legally changed - belonging to someone whose genetics I don't share but who loves me as a father should. And I inherited Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy, ADD, big wrist bones, a Jay Leno chin, a tendency to be fat, oh, the list is endless. I don't mind - none of the illnesses or maladies will kill me outright, so I am OK with it. In 1968, who knew what you might be passing on? But knowing what I know, in 2005, why under the sun would I knowingly pass this along?
Reason #4: It's what you do next.
Just like anything in life, it is programming... as a woman, you are programmed to go to school, go to college, get a good, solid job, land a man, get married, have babies (oh, yes, usually more than one), stop working and turn into a mindless automaton who raises kids and turns into a soccer mom and lives madly for those moments when she can foist her kids off on some other hapless mother to go grocery shopping alone! This is programming. My mother (who has had a huge and positive impact on my outlook and way of seeing things) never did any programming with me. I was not programmed into any religion, I was not programmed to wear skirts and be a girly-girl, I was not programmed to sew or knit or crochet or cook. I was programmed to believe that I can do anything I want. And that I had the same freedom to not do things. I love her more than can be imaged for that. So there was never any "this is the next step" training in my life.
Reason #5: Go forth and multiply (or "this is what God put us on Earth for").
Does anyone really buy this line of thinking any more? Sure. More brainwashed people. At the time that we were having twelve kids in the hopes that two would survive and go on to assist in populating the world, this was logical thinking. You needed to have a bunch of pregnancies... to ensure that some were live, viable births and that some made it through all the childhood maladies and adult maladies and weren't killed in accidents and tragedies and internecine wars and whatever else killed people by the scores. When survival was a rate thing, sure, breeding was a very important thing. But now that we overpopulate the earth like an infestation of the worst kind and kill off our resources mightn't it be a good idea to get away from misguided thinking like that?
Reason #6: I'll have more hands to help.
Refer to reason #2. Indentured servitude, anyone? Oh, wait, no, that would be slavery. Servitude is remuneration for a service performed by the employer.
Reason #7: The more children we have, the more they entertain one another.
Yikes. People scare me. Or maybe they have forgotten all the sibling rivalry and infighting that took place.
Reason #8: There is no occupation more rewarding than motherhood.
Hmmm. In some fashion that is true. There are undoubtedly rewards that come with seeing your kids turn into (you hope) responsible adults. However, from where I sit, the rewards do not include: a paycheck, a vacation/sick/personal time package, any health benefits, definitely no dental, lousy retirement package... did I forget anything? Oh, yes, the most unrecognised, unending, ceaseless job ever that mostly mothers have and fathers avoid. Let's look at those rewards, shall we? For myself, I will pass!
Reason #9: Parenthood is investing in eternity.
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you are going to die anyway.
Reason #10: My children help me surrender the selfish desires of my flesh.
Well, this is certainly true enough. Any woman with kids will tell you that her sex drive has decreased dramatically with the arrival of the offspring. This is not a good thing. Let's talk to the philandering spouses who did not lose their interest in sex... Not that this happens to all women. I'm happy to say that my mother never suffered from that at all. She did not want to sleep with my biological father, but that had nothing to do with her loss of drive - it was due to his being a stupendous alcoholic!
Reason #11: Everyone else is having them/has them.
Oh, my. Sounds a lot like lemmings, doesn't it? Lemmings all commit suicide - probably because everyone else is doing it. Remember your parents saying to you, "If XYZ jumped off a bridge, you would, too?" Some how that gets left out when grown children tell their parents that they are expecting. But you get the idea. Is there a more senseless reason to have kids? (Well, I have a whole lot of senseless reasons to have kids, so maybe, just maybe, there are. Still, this rates pretty high on the stupidity list!
Reason #12: We are having a rough patch in our marriage so having a baby will fix that.
Don't laugh. It is positively staggering how many people - usually women - think that. This is as misguided as thinking that making your boyfriend/girlfriend jealous will produce any positive results. The answer is a resounding NO! Babies add a component of stress that nothing else in life can. People survive life-threatening diseases, fatal accidents, wandering spouses, but no floundering marriage survives the introduction of an infant into the already bad mix.
I think twelve reasons are plenty. Shall we discuss under what circumstances you SHOULD have children? Yes! There is actually a reason to take that plunge!
Reason to Have Children: There is only one good reason to have children - loving to do the vast majority of the things required of parents. Sure there are some things nobody is going to like, for example, changing diapers. But, if you are the kind of person who feels fulfilled getting up out of bed in the middle of the night to comfort an upset child and performing countless menial tasks for the semi-aware, then you and only you should seriously consider child rearing. There are people like that. I know that Quilt Queen and Flyboy fit into this category. They are really the ONLY people I know that I would describe that way. Pretty scary, isn't it, when you think of how many people have children and clearly are not that way.
I have had more friends confide in me and not want their spouse to know that if they had to do it all over again, they wouldn't. Guess what. My mother told me the same thing. I don't find that insulting or hurtful or anything of that nature. I was there - I know what I put them through. I know I created all sorts of hideous issues just in the normal process of growing up that no one thinks anyone else goes through. I won't say what I did do, it is our own private insanity, but I will tell you that I:
did not do drugs
did not drink alcohol
did not wreck their cars
did not burn down or seriously damage the house
did not tote a gun
did not have any out-of-wedlock babies
How many kids do these things listed above? Too many to count! And I did not do them and they still would not want to do it again! What does that tell you?
Anyone not 100% sure that kids are what they want? Go to this Web site. Try out the different Child Prep steps given. If you come out of that thinking that you may want children, go forth with my blessings and multiply! http://www.handpen.com/Bio/children.htm#Good
Still not sure? Try this one: http://www.geocities.com/zpg1957/whynokids.htm. I'm not saying you may not be OK with that. But it is food for thought. Most people have absolutely no idea what they are in for when they decide on some arbitrary whim to have children. None of what I have read is untrue. It is not pretty, but it is the part that no one tells you about.
Parents who are spineless are the biggest offenders to me. If you are not prepared to parent (good and bad) then do the planet and your currently non-existent kids a favour and DON'T HAVE ANY! If you are not prepared to punish your child (without resorting to violence or any kind of physical force), then go without, please! Parents who allow their children to whine or throw things should be charged with criminal non-parenting! No one in the world wants to hear a whiney child. If you let them run around like hooligans in a restaurant or grocery store or doctor's waiting room, you need to be ticketed by the police. Kids need to run around and be hooligans - they have entirely too much energy and it needs to be expelled - but there are settings where it is never appropriate to do this. The above are a couple of them. There are more. But there are plenty of places and things to allow them the outlets they need.
I just hate it when the parents of the world try to use logic and reason on their two through five year old. I may be over shooting the age, but certain at age two and three you cannot sit there and tell your child, "Please don't upend the glass of water. This is not how good children behave." No. You firmly remove the glass from the child's hand and tell them, "No." in a firm, no-nonsense tone.
Food shopping is a bad thing. I feel for parents who have to bring their kids with them for the joys of grocery shopping listening to a chorus of "I want" and "Gimme", but if they turn into hooligans and start running up and down the aisles, put the cart to one side and tell them it is time to go. Or tell them it is time out for them for a half-hour when you get home, and see if this doesn't work.
Oops. My 40-year-old child is whining about dinner. Time out!
OK, I realise that my feelings about kids are fairly plain. I have never made a secret of it and never pulled my punches about how much other people's kids bother me. It is NOT a flaw thing or a blame thing (although the gods' know that there are plenty of poorly behaved kids thanks to lousy parents!). It is simply a matter of kids - normal kids - just getting on my nerves. I was a kid, too, and undoubtedly got on people's nerves and would absolutely have made me the adult just as crazy as any kid would! I just have zero ability to put up with perfectly normal, well-behaved kids. We'll touch on bad kids or poorly behaved kids later.
When my friends have children, as they are doing now, it is a wholly different thing. Sure, they still might annoy me but not nearly as much as just any kid that I don't know would. I enjoyed my pen friend’s son and daughter in New Hampshire and I love Matthew. Stephanos is special, too. I feel that way about the R&R Chief's kids, too. These are my close friends' children and that makes a world of difference.
With Flyboy and Quilt Queen, it is much more special that almost anyone, as we have been friends for years with Flyboy. His child is super-special to me. And at one point she had asked why I am taking such an interest in Matthew and I replied, "It's a completely different thing. I still don't care for kids, but Matthew isn't just any child, he's your child!"
If you are wondering why I make exceptions for a small select group of kids, this is it.
Now, as for poorly behaved kids... this is not the child's fault! Children need supervision and constant praise and rewarding for good behaviour and reinforcement and punishment for poor or naughty behaviour. If a parent is lax in doing this, the child is quick to take advantage of this. Who wouldn't? Adults will do it to - push the envelope as far as they can. Test the boundaries. Whatever you want to call it.
Certain behaviours are universally unacceptable:
1. Whining
2. Pinching/hitting/rough physical behaviour
3. Shouting
4. Cursing or poor use of language
However, certain sayings & forms of thinking are also (to me) unacceptable: (I will discuss below)
1. "Spare the rod, spoil the child" (I have an exceptional poor opinion of anyone striking their children in any fashion)
2. "Children should be seen and not heard" (if you believe that, you definitely shouldn't have kids)
3. Presenting a united front - not a saying but a thing that parents practice - bad idea
4. Others saying you should have children because fill in the blank. (The green section is devoted to just this.)
(I'm sure that there are other sayings & tidbits of bed thinking that I cannot think of that are just as odious as those above...)
1. There are plenty of perfectly terrible parents around - more than are good. I don't agree with ever hitting your kids. I know they'll make any adult crazy - fairly often, too - but my parents never ever struck me (no comments from the peanut gallery, please! [grin]). I wasn't a perfect kid and any0ne who tells you that they have a perfect child that never did anything wrong is absolutely lying through their pearly whites! But hitting would not have made me a better kid. My parents also made it very clear to my grandparents that corporal punishment would not be tolerated. Whatever low opinion my grandmother had of that rule, she was intelligent enough to know that one strike is all she would get before my mother pulled the plug on her seeing me.
2. Children should be seen and not heard. I guess in a perfect world infants, babies, toddlers and kids would not scream, cry, carry on, throw fits, and try out their voices. However, kids are by nature loud. Certainly infants and babies are. They have no other recourse but to cry - they can't communicate otherwise. No one's super-precocious 6-month-old can sit up and say, "Hey, there, Mummy, what is up with this diaper?" or "Listen, the tummy is a-rumbling, when's chow-time?" They can only cry. On the other hand, when they have just been fed, the diaper is clean and there is nothing else obviously wrong, put the kid down and let him or her cry it out.
3. The United Front form of Parenting: This is a big thing that many parents do but mine did not. If they disagreed on something, they would discuss it and sometimes I would be granted the request and other times not. Or sometimes I got a reprieve on something and sometimes I didn't. But it was nice that there was sometimes someone in my corner fighting for me instead of always forming that us against the kid thing. I hate that. And I don't know a kid in the world that did not wonder why the parents were always out to get him or her or against him or her.
4. You should have children because fill in the blank.
Are you ready for this, patient reader? Oh, yes, it is a lengthy list!
OK. Reason #1: You are not a "real" woman until you have children.
Would you believe my first HR manager told me this? I wouldn't... certainly not from someone who, in all other ways, was a very intelligent, earthy, caring person. But she actually told me that. I guess she was thinking that no matter what I thought about having kids then, I would change my mind and eventually become that real woman. I still find that my response today is the same as it was seven years ago... I looked down at my C-cup chest, looked up, and replied, "I am a real woman. This chest is the give-away."
Reason #2: Who will take care of you in your old age?
Considering the source of this infamous reason, I should have seen it coming when Luis Sr. moved in with us. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me! He used to say this all the time. And I always wondered why anyone has kids under this misguided thinking. I am not bringing lives into this world with the idea that they should "owe" me anything. Apparently, however, many people including Luis' father, feel that their progeny are, in fact, indentured servants of a sort. Terrible. Talk about the ultimate in self-serving, completely selfish behaviour. And now that Luis Sr. lives with us, he is discovering daily that we emphatically do not agree with his view of what life with his kids would be like. Surprise!
Reason #3: You need someone to carry on the family name/family line.
That would go along with the family genes: the heart failure history, the cancer history, the Alzheimer’s history. My mother seems to constantly be apologising for all the maladies that she knows has been passed on to me. This is not her fault - no one thinks of this when they have kids - but there you have it. I inherited a name that I legally changed - belonging to someone whose genetics I don't share but who loves me as a father should. And I inherited Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy, ADD, big wrist bones, a Jay Leno chin, a tendency to be fat, oh, the list is endless. I don't mind - none of the illnesses or maladies will kill me outright, so I am OK with it. In 1968, who knew what you might be passing on? But knowing what I know, in 2005, why under the sun would I knowingly pass this along?
Reason #4: It's what you do next.
Just like anything in life, it is programming... as a woman, you are programmed to go to school, go to college, get a good, solid job, land a man, get married, have babies (oh, yes, usually more than one), stop working and turn into a mindless automaton who raises kids and turns into a soccer mom and lives madly for those moments when she can foist her kids off on some other hapless mother to go grocery shopping alone! This is programming. My mother (who has had a huge and positive impact on my outlook and way of seeing things) never did any programming with me. I was not programmed into any religion, I was not programmed to wear skirts and be a girly-girl, I was not programmed to sew or knit or crochet or cook. I was programmed to believe that I can do anything I want. And that I had the same freedom to not do things. I love her more than can be imaged for that. So there was never any "this is the next step" training in my life.
Reason #5: Go forth and multiply (or "this is what God put us on Earth for").
Does anyone really buy this line of thinking any more? Sure. More brainwashed people. At the time that we were having twelve kids in the hopes that two would survive and go on to assist in populating the world, this was logical thinking. You needed to have a bunch of pregnancies... to ensure that some were live, viable births and that some made it through all the childhood maladies and adult maladies and weren't killed in accidents and tragedies and internecine wars and whatever else killed people by the scores. When survival was a rate thing, sure, breeding was a very important thing. But now that we overpopulate the earth like an infestation of the worst kind and kill off our resources mightn't it be a good idea to get away from misguided thinking like that?
Reason #6: I'll have more hands to help.
Refer to reason #2. Indentured servitude, anyone? Oh, wait, no, that would be slavery. Servitude is remuneration for a service performed by the employer.
Reason #7: The more children we have, the more they entertain one another.
Yikes. People scare me. Or maybe they have forgotten all the sibling rivalry and infighting that took place.
Reason #8: There is no occupation more rewarding than motherhood.
Hmmm. In some fashion that is true. There are undoubtedly rewards that come with seeing your kids turn into (you hope) responsible adults. However, from where I sit, the rewards do not include: a paycheck, a vacation/sick/personal time package, any health benefits, definitely no dental, lousy retirement package... did I forget anything? Oh, yes, the most unrecognised, unending, ceaseless job ever that mostly mothers have and fathers avoid. Let's look at those rewards, shall we? For myself, I will pass!
Reason #9: Parenthood is investing in eternity.
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you are going to die anyway.
Reason #10: My children help me surrender the selfish desires of my flesh.
Well, this is certainly true enough. Any woman with kids will tell you that her sex drive has decreased dramatically with the arrival of the offspring. This is not a good thing. Let's talk to the philandering spouses who did not lose their interest in sex... Not that this happens to all women. I'm happy to say that my mother never suffered from that at all. She did not want to sleep with my biological father, but that had nothing to do with her loss of drive - it was due to his being a stupendous alcoholic!
Reason #11: Everyone else is having them/has them.
Oh, my. Sounds a lot like lemmings, doesn't it? Lemmings all commit suicide - probably because everyone else is doing it. Remember your parents saying to you, "If XYZ jumped off a bridge, you would, too?" Some how that gets left out when grown children tell their parents that they are expecting. But you get the idea. Is there a more senseless reason to have kids? (Well, I have a whole lot of senseless reasons to have kids, so maybe, just maybe, there are. Still, this rates pretty high on the stupidity list!
Reason #12: We are having a rough patch in our marriage so having a baby will fix that.
Don't laugh. It is positively staggering how many people - usually women - think that. This is as misguided as thinking that making your boyfriend/girlfriend jealous will produce any positive results. The answer is a resounding NO! Babies add a component of stress that nothing else in life can. People survive life-threatening diseases, fatal accidents, wandering spouses, but no floundering marriage survives the introduction of an infant into the already bad mix.
I think twelve reasons are plenty. Shall we discuss under what circumstances you SHOULD have children? Yes! There is actually a reason to take that plunge!
Reason to Have Children: There is only one good reason to have children - loving to do the vast majority of the things required of parents. Sure there are some things nobody is going to like, for example, changing diapers. But, if you are the kind of person who feels fulfilled getting up out of bed in the middle of the night to comfort an upset child and performing countless menial tasks for the semi-aware, then you and only you should seriously consider child rearing. There are people like that. I know that Quilt Queen and Flyboy fit into this category. They are really the ONLY people I know that I would describe that way. Pretty scary, isn't it, when you think of how many people have children and clearly are not that way.
I have had more friends confide in me and not want their spouse to know that if they had to do it all over again, they wouldn't. Guess what. My mother told me the same thing. I don't find that insulting or hurtful or anything of that nature. I was there - I know what I put them through. I know I created all sorts of hideous issues just in the normal process of growing up that no one thinks anyone else goes through. I won't say what I did do, it is our own private insanity, but I will tell you that I:
did not do drugs
did not drink alcohol
did not wreck their cars
did not burn down or seriously damage the house
did not tote a gun
did not have any out-of-wedlock babies
How many kids do these things listed above? Too many to count! And I did not do them and they still would not want to do it again! What does that tell you?
Anyone not 100% sure that kids are what they want? Go to this Web site. Try out the different Child Prep steps given. If you come out of that thinking that you may want children, go forth with my blessings and multiply! http://www.handpen.com/Bio/children.htm#Good
Still not sure? Try this one: http://www.geocities.com/zpg1957/whynokids.htm. I'm not saying you may not be OK with that. But it is food for thought. Most people have absolutely no idea what they are in for when they decide on some arbitrary whim to have children. None of what I have read is untrue. It is not pretty, but it is the part that no one tells you about.
Parents who are spineless are the biggest offenders to me. If you are not prepared to parent (good and bad) then do the planet and your currently non-existent kids a favour and DON'T HAVE ANY! If you are not prepared to punish your child (without resorting to violence or any kind of physical force), then go without, please! Parents who allow their children to whine or throw things should be charged with criminal non-parenting! No one in the world wants to hear a whiney child. If you let them run around like hooligans in a restaurant or grocery store or doctor's waiting room, you need to be ticketed by the police. Kids need to run around and be hooligans - they have entirely too much energy and it needs to be expelled - but there are settings where it is never appropriate to do this. The above are a couple of them. There are more. But there are plenty of places and things to allow them the outlets they need.
I just hate it when the parents of the world try to use logic and reason on their two through five year old. I may be over shooting the age, but certain at age two and three you cannot sit there and tell your child, "Please don't upend the glass of water. This is not how good children behave." No. You firmly remove the glass from the child's hand and tell them, "No." in a firm, no-nonsense tone.
Food shopping is a bad thing. I feel for parents who have to bring their kids with them for the joys of grocery shopping listening to a chorus of "I want" and "Gimme", but if they turn into hooligans and start running up and down the aisles, put the cart to one side and tell them it is time to go. Or tell them it is time out for them for a half-hour when you get home, and see if this doesn't work.
Oops. My 40-year-old child is whining about dinner. Time out!
Comments
I know its not normal but Im just not patient enough.