Anatomy of a Meltdown

A tantrum is like a snowflake. Every one is different and both can change your day’s plans, leaving you to question why you made plans in the first place.

However, I have been studying the inner workings of tantrums and believe I have identified about 95% of them correctly. (This result has a 95% margin of error.)

Please note: neither the subject nor the researcher were harmed during the course of this experiment. Safety goggles were utilized.

The hot flash: As soon as you tell her “no” to a request, spoken, grunted or pointed, she takes a face plant or a back dive to the floor without warning, trying to make contact with something on the way down so her cries of pain and frustration will increase to an almost banshee level.

To read our Post of the Week in its entirety, please visit Sprite’s Keeper — Home of The Spin Cycle.

Subscribe to Jen’s Feed –> Atom | RSS 1.0 | RSS 2.0

The Bean

What if…

What if I had never subscribed to Maggie, Dammit’s blog?  What if I hadn’t gone back to see what her visitors had to say?  What if that one comment hadn’t jumped out at me and made me belly laugh?  What if I never clicked on the visitor’s link and discovered the world of The Bean?

It’s sad to know that I would’ve missed the tears that streamed down my face when I laughed so hard from reading Achoo. It also sucks to realize that I would have missed out on not only the post itself, but the comments left by Beej’s visitors.

If you ask me (and yes, I am painfully aware that no one has), it’s the SNEEZER who should be required to say something, like “Excuse me” or “Pardon me” or “Sorry I snotted on you.” The SNEEZEE shouldn’t be obligated to say anything except maybe “Gross! You just snotted on me!” possibly followed by some retching sounds.

What if I hadn’t laughed so hard at that blog post? Would I have moved on to another blog? Would I have ever known that Beej’s husband is a superhero who ruined Sam Elliott’s life? Would I ever have been reassured that I am not in fact, the clumsiest person in the world?

What if I had found Beej’s blog months ago? What if I had subscribed to The Bean and I had jumped over to her site when she posted The Mystery of the Desk Booger? Would I have figured out what the desk booger really was? Would I have won the prize?

Sure seemed like a typical Thursday morning. But then I looked down at my desk and immediately recoiled, shouting “Eeeww! Desk booger!” And then I ran away.

After a few minutes of hiding in the break room I thought to myself, “Self, that thing was really big, and really WHITE, and it might not have been an actual booger. It might be something else, and you can’t sit here in the break room all day hiding from it. Even if it WAS a booger you still have to come to terms with it and get to work.” So I went back to my desk to investigate and take pictures.

What if I had never discovered that it’s okay to have a post with only 20 words and it is acceptable to conclude said post with a 1,208 word footnote?

What if Beej didn’t have 14 pages of archives when I decided I needed to read each and every single post she’d written? Would I have stayed up until 4am reading, knowing full well that I had to get up at 6? Would I have done dishes today instead of reading? Would I have remembered it was lunch time without my children reminding me that they were going to die of starvation?

What if you don’t like cursing. Or sarcasm. Or things that are Awesome? Then you most definitely will not love The Bean as much as I do and you should totally not subscribe to her feed.

What if Sprite’s Keeper hadn’t decided that this week’s Spin Cycle should be “What If…”?