Before I forget again! I discovered why folks have had problems making comments on this blog. I don’t claim to be very good at these things, but somehow I had the settings wrong from what I intended and it did not allow everyone to make comments. Hopefully that is “fixed”, so feel free to comment on anything you read here. Just keep it honest and clean, please no foul language or particularly ‘hateful’ talk. Disagreeing opinions are welcome.
You might note, that I try to avoid using other peoples names as much as possible on this blog. Other than names of friends that have passed away, I do this for security and privacy concerns. Between the internet and government it seems that no one can keep any degree of privacy. I just don’t want to use peoples names in my writing, at least not their full name. Personally, I don’t care about my own name being ‘public’, otherwise I would have never started a blog. But I try to avoid using my families name or friends names. Too many criminals spend too much time on the internet trying to learn all they can about people, usually for identity theft purposes or who knows why, but to avoid helping any of these attempts out, I just stay away from using names.
MN weather took a fast turn overnight. At 10 PM last evening it was still almost 30° , but by daylight it was down to 10° . At least it firmed up the mud and was still sunny and clear, so it did not feel as cold as it would if it was cloudy or windy. Tonight, they say, we will dip below 0 again. That is to be expected as we grade lumber tomorrow in the “great outdoors”, someone on this grading crew is a ‘jinx’!
All of us have heard most of our lives that it is not a good thing to raise an ‘only child’, I can’t argue the point, since I don’t have a great deal of experience with more than one child, that is, more than one at a time anyway! Not everyone has the ‘charming’ experience of raising 2 “only children”. Technically, since we have two children they can’t be said to be an only child. But when those children are born, by no planning on our part I might add, 22 years apart, they are raised for all intents and purposes as ’only children’. So we have the ‘pleasure’ of raising two ‘only children’.
I bring this up because when our first daughter was a child, pre-teen years, I was not around home all that much. Being young seems to require an extreme amount of time spent “on the job”, not that I spend that much less time working now, it is just that most of my work is just outside the backdoor, so to speak. So I get the opportunity to watch this latest child on a daily basis and see how they manage things without a sibling.
I can’t speak from their perspective since when I grew up, there was no such thing as being “alone” very much. With one brother and 4 sisters, there was always plenty of siblings around to either do things with, or ’antagonize’, whatever the case may be. From what I observe, only children make playmates with their pets. We have always had pets around, whether it be a dog, or several, or cat, or a whole herd of them, a goat at one time, now a ’half-wild’ horse. The children seem to spend a lot of their free time either playing with their animals or ’antagonizing’ them, just like other children do with their siblings.
In the current state of affairs, our 11 year old daughter is ’obsessed’ with trying to ride her ’half-wild’ horse. This is not a full size horse, nor is it actually a pony. Some people call it a miniature horse, but I don’t think that is truly the case either. At any rate, this horse is a bit larger than most ponies, but much smaller than a full size horse.
We have had this ’thing’ over 2 years now, just over the last month or so she has been able to climb on its back without being thrown off. I think it must be ’stuffed’ with ’horse treats’ to the point that it can’t throw her! I know it takes a lot of treats to keep it distracted long enough for her to jump on its back without saddle, bridle or even rope to hold too. She latches onto its mane with a ‘death grip’ and hangs on. Most of the time Brownie (that is its name) just stands there chewing on her treat. Then the child starts working at getting her to move. More often than not, when she does move, it is at a good clip so our daughter gets a good workout trying to stay mounted on this animal.
As I am working in the shop I can look out my window and often watch the circus. It is a bit worrisome at times wondering when there will be a ‘broken bone’ from this affair, but so far nothing serious has happen.
Then there are the times an only child will gather up all their animals, a dog, several cats and attempt to play “school”, with them being her students. Now that is funny! I suspect it is not much different than many classrooms you hear about on the news. Just try to get a young Beagle dog to sit still when there are 3 cats close by, a good definition of ‘chaos’ could be illustrated right there. Just like a ‘bully’ child, the Beagle knows which cat he can mess, the old Tom won’t put up with anything, but one of the young cats is the ‘victim’ of much abuse, the cat is plenty big enough to draw blood from the Beagle’s nose, but mostly it appears to like the rough play. In the mean time the “teacher” is trying to bring order to her classroom, without much success as far as I have observed.
Last evening we had some friends stop in who have 4 children, all under about 7 years old I think. Once those little fellows got warmed up, I could not help but think; maybe an only child is not so bad after all. J
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