Keeping History Alive, Part 3: Ancestry.com
It’s been nearly a month since the last installment in my Keeping History Alive series. There was a good reason for this, though. I’ve been busy trying out Ancestry.com. The folks over at Ancestry.com were nice enough to give me a month free to review the site and I kind of got lost in it. Not in the “it’s a maze where you can’t find anything” sense. Their website is very well put together. It is both easy to use and feature-rich, a balance that can be hard to strike. Instead, I got lost in the “there’s so much information here I don’t know where to begin” sense.
My Bullied History, Part 1 – Elementary School
Recently, a young girl comitted suicide due to being bullied. I’ve struggled long and hard about the best way to approach this topic. It isn’t easy for me to talk about as I was bullied myself for years and still have some emotional scars. I had hopes that NHL would escape what I went through, but the other week, as I dropped him off at school, he told me that some kids were calling him names. B asked and it turned out that they were all calling each other names. It doesn’t excuse it, but at least he’s not being singled out for “special treatment” yet.
If he is singled out and bullied, however, I’m going to need to figure out a course of action. And that’s going to mean drawing upon my experiences as a young bullied kid. This, in turn, is going to mean confronting this history head-on. So think of this week’s blog posts as therapy.
My own bullied history (as far as I can remember) begins in the second grade. The bully hear wasn’t a peer of mine, but the teacher. Yes, you read that right: the teacher. Don’t ask me why she became a teacher because Mrs. D hated kids. She particularly hated little boys and, for some reason, she despised me. She would make fun of me in front of the rest of the class. She would tell me that I’d never succeed in life because I couldn’t color or cut within the lines. She would send home busy work just for me such as writing out my ABC’s. This busy work would get turned in to her only for her to hand it back to me (unmarked) with the exact same assignment for that night. My mother eventually had me hand in the same paper over and over and she never was able to tell.
There was a bathroom in the room and I would go there as frequently as I could just to get away from her. When I got the chicken pox, I was happy to be out of her classroom for awhile. I actually dropped out of school, refusing to go back, because she was so mean to me. My parents let me stay out for a short while but then sent me back. Of course, my parents tried getting me out of her class. The principal wouldn’t allow it, though. He insisted that she was their best teacher and refused to consider any possibility of her being a Teacher-Bully.
I suffered through second grade and could have easily become the kind of kid who hated school and barely got D’s. Instead, in third grade, I ran into Mrs. S. Mrs. S gave me a standardized reading test along with the rest of her class. She remarked how well I did and how she wanted me to try the advanced reading test. When I aced that one too, she put me in the advanced reading group. This led to other advanced classes which led to AP and college level courses down the road. I credit Mrs. S. for pulling me out of the train wreck of the second grade and putting me on the fast track to a great education.
Years later, I returned to my elementary school. I wanted to visit with my old teachers, but mostly I wanted to confront Mrs D with the fact that I was succeeding despite her prediction. Unfortunately, she had retired the previous year and moved away. She had robbed me of the chance to show her she was wrong, but I decided that proving that she was wrong about me by succeeding in school was good enough for me.
Coming up next week, things go from bad to worse…
Project New Me: Week #18 or Finish Line Within Sight #newme
Weight: 188.5 lbs (up 1.5 pounds)
Average Hours of Sleep: 5.4 hours
Total Workout Time: 0
Total Calories Burned: 0
As expected, I inched a bit above my goal weight this week. I’m not too worried about this. It’s not that high above. One and a half pounds in 2 weeks is completely doable – even if birthday parties for JSL might mess me up a bit. My big problem recently has been sleep. I tend to get very tired around 7pm. Unfortunately, I can’t just go to sleep. I need to help get the kids ready for and into bed. Once this is done, I get a second wind which lasts until about 11pm – 1am (depending on the day). Then my energy levels crash and I drag myself into bed, completely exhausted. Of course, by the time I do this, I don’t get enough sleep during the night and I’m tired the next day. Until it is time to go to sleep, though, at which time my second wind kicks in again. Wash, rinse, repeat. I’ve got to start learning to ignore that second wind (at least most nights) and go to sleep at a reasonable time.
As my Project New Me winds to a close, I’m also thinking of going over the data I collected during the 20 weeks it ran. Obviously, I rarely exercised, so that’s pretty useless. (I only keep those “Workout Time/Calories Burned” lines in there because I copy/paste from the previous week’s post to get the new one started. Total inertia.) However, it might be interesting to see whether my weight fluctuations were tied in any way to my sleep patterns.
Happy Mother’s Day To My Angel Forever
Six years ago, we celebrated Mother’s Day for the first time in the TechyDad-TheAngelForever household. We might have celebrated the year before when B was pregnant with NHL, but 2004 was our first real Mother’s Day. Since then, she’s proven time and time again what a great mother she is. There’s nobody I’d rather have by my side when raising our children. She’s an amazing woman and I treasure every moment we’re together. So, B, I hope you have a wonderful Mother’s Day. NHL, JSL and I all love you very much. (Don’t worry, we’re going to tell her in person. Not going to rely on a blog post for that!)
And to all the other mother’s out there, I hope you have a great Mother’s Day too!