So…Was This One Finally Tragic Enough?
Dec 14, 2012 What's Going On
In 1984, when I was twelve, I spent the summer in Ireland visiting my grandmother. All anyone was talking about was the Olympics. Then one day, the banner headline in the Dublin paper screamed about a bunch of kids being killed at a McDonald’s in California. I was horrified. I was not at all political and didn’t really know anything about gun laws, so I processed it as a child would: I eat at McDonald’s, that could have been me. I read everything I could about the kids who had died. I felt awful.
I was driving home from work in 1999 when 1010 Wins started talking about a school shooting. It was happening in Colorado, at a high school named Columbine. I wasn’t a mom yet, so I didn’t have my own kids to project the tragedy on to – it didn’t quite have the gut-punch feeling that today’s events had on me – but I was devastated learning about all of the promising young lives cut short. And I thought to myself, maybe now people will really start doing something about guns.
After the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007 I thought, this is it. This is the one that will cripple the NRA and lead to change, once and for all.
Then the movie theater massacre just this past July, again in Colorado. Surely, this time…
So, was today’s tragedy bad enough for the people who devote their lives to ensuring that guns are easy to get? Were the victims sympathetic enough? Young enough? Innocent enough? Were there enough of them?
If this doesn’t change our country’s thinking when it comes to guns, then I don’t know what will. I’m waiting. Waiting to see how the NRA defends this, puts the blame elsewhere. Waiting to see which politician or pundit trots out gun ownership lies that are so ridiculously easy to disprove. Because if this doesn’t convince them…
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
THIS Is Why Gun Control Matters
Dec 14, 2012 What's Going On
[Please not: there are several factual errors in this post, things that were being reported while I was writing this that turned out not to be true. These errors do not change the sentiment of the post.]
I had Rachael Ray on this morning when abc broke in with news of a school shooting in Connecticut. And my first thought was, which asshole politician will be the first one to defend the right for people to own guns today?
First there was news of three people wounded and the gunman dead. Then there were reports that there were several people dead, including children. Then, suddenly, there were fourteen people dead. Then twenty-seven dead. Most of them children. That’s where things stand right now. I’m not sure at what point I ended up sobbing on my kitchen floor, but eventually I stopped crying and got pissed off.
And when other pissed off people, smart people, high-profile people, people who are able to understand statistics and human nature and who aren’t getting money from the NRA, when those people start talking about the need for stricter gun control, gun proponents will make the same tired arguments. That guns don’t kill people, people kill people. That criminals don’t use legal guns anyway. That someone who really wants a gun will find a way to get one, no matter what the laws say.
And here’s why that’s complete bullshit.
It’s not criminals that I’m afraid of anymore. It’s a normal person who snaps. This is apparently an excellent school in a town that has basically no crime. Reports are that the gunman was a parent at the school. Not a gang member, not a terrorist, but a parent. Someone who would probably have no problem getting a gun in a completely legal manner, who would have no need to get a gun illegally.
I have no idea what went through the shooter’s mind as he headed to an elementary school carrying, reportedly, four guns. How easy was it for him to get those guns? Did he have to fill out a few forms? Did he already have guns at home before he hatched this plan, just because?
What if he had had to jump through more hoops to get guns? What if he’d been forced to search out an illegal gun? Would he have been caught? Would the extra time have caused him to rethink what he wanted to do? If he’d had to try harder to get guns, would he have maybe calmed down? Or maybe tipped someone else off about what he was planning?
There are more reasons than I could list why people snap and get violent. What they have at their disposal makes the difference between a fistfight or a stabbing, and dozens of people being dead. Guns kill people. They kill them quickly, they kill them more than one at a time, they kill them before the victims even know what’s going on.
Right now, there are parents at that school in Connecticut who haven’t been able to pick up their children yet, and in dozens of cases, that’s because their kids are dead. There are no words for what they’re going through right now. It’s a pain that nobody should ever have to endure. As a society that has been so successful in so many other ways, what can we do to turn this around? To make sure that parents don’t have to go through something like this again?
My child’s safety is more important than your right to keep a gun around. I have zero patience at this point for anyone who argues any differently.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Please Join Me For The #WorryFreeHome Twitter Party
Nov 8, 2012 Paid/Sponsored Post
[The following post was commissioned by Kidde.]
Does this sound familiar? You’re asleep. Something wakes you up, but in your half-awake state you can’t figure out what. You try to go back to sleep, and as you drift off again, you’re jerked awake by a sound…you can’t quite place where it’s coming from, but it’s a beep of some kind. Still, you don’t want to get out of bed. Maybe it will stop on its own…
Eventually, you give up and get out of bed, and try to find what’s making the noise. It’s your smoke detector, doing the low-battery routine. Not wanting to leave yourself without an alarm, you climb onto a chair at three in the morning to replace the battery.
Out of all the things that annoy me about my house – windows that rattle in the wind, creaky stairs, doorknobs that fall off onto toes – the middle-of-the-night beep drives me the most crazy. That’s just one of the things we’ll be talking about on Wednesday, November 14th at 8pm Eastern, during the #WorryFreeHome twitter party, hosted by Kidde, makers of the new Worry-Free line of smoke alarms.
These new alarms have a sealed-in lithium battery that lasts for ten years! That’s one less thing in your home to worry about. Join us for a fun discussion about things that annoy you around your house, how to keep safe in case of a fire, and the great features of the new Kidde Worry-Free Alarms.
And of course, there will be prizes! We’ll be giving away gift cards and alarms from the new Worry-Free line, including a grand prize worth almost $250!
All you have to do to be eligible to win is RSVP in the comments section of this post (leave your twitter handle in the comment), and participate in the party on November 14th. See you there!
#WorryFreeHome Twitter Party
Wednesday, November 14th, 8-9pm Eastern
RSVP in the comments section of this post by leaving your twitter handle.
And make sure to participate on Wednesday!
Want an easy way to follow along during the party?
See you Wednesday!
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 18. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: Kidde, safety, twitter party
Hax Attacks: Learn Online Security While Gaming
Nov 7, 2012 Paid/Sponsored Post
[The following post was commissioned by Cyber Griffin.]
This summer my eleven-year-old son, Jake, learned a hard online lesson. There’s a block building game that he’s been playing for two or three years, building up virtual coins. He had a lot of coins. But one morning I found him near tears, staring at his laptop. “I think I got hacked!” he yelled. I asked him what happened, and he told me that all of his coins were gone. At first he tried to tell me that he thought someone must have hacked into his account and stolen them. And I believed him, because his password was too easy. But after further questioning, he admitted that he had given his password to someone who had messaged him in the game.
I was so mad. I don’t even know what I said, but I yelled. I couldn’t believe, after all the times we’d talked about it, that he had given someone else his password.
This person had told him that if Jake gave him his password, he could turn Jake’s coins into ten times as many. And Jake, being coin greedy, believed him. And now his coins were gone. And I have to say, in the end I was a little glad – he had learned this lesson with virtual coins, instead of a bank account. No matter how much I had warned him, I’m his mom – it had gone in one ear and largely out the other. But the feeling of loss? Of being tricked? I knew that would stay with him.
There’s a new online security game, Hax Attacks, that came into Jake’s life at a good time. Still smarting from the coin loss, he started playing it before I even asked him to. He found it on our iPad, tried it, and instantly loved it. In fact, one day I said “Hey Jake, whatever you’re playing, could you stop and help me with something called Hax Attacks?” And he rolled his eyes and said “That’s what I’m playing!” An excellent sign.
Hax Attacks takes online security issues – passwords, firewalls, viruses, phishing, etc. – and turns them into a learning game. The basic premise is that you need to move your data from one place to another, safely, avoiding viruses and other attacks. And along the way you get tips about how to do that in the real world.
My favorite part – despite it being the one I am worst at – is the hackability meter, where you have to make up a password and then you get rated on how hackable it is. This was a really good lesson for both of us – it took many tries to learn the tricks to making good password. The password strength analysis breaks down exactly where your strengths and weaknesses are, so that you can improve.
Jake’s almost done with all of the levels (I’m nowhere near that!) and is still loving the game. And being a kid, the information gets into his brain in a way that it just wouldn’t if spoken by his mom. He explained phishing to his sister in a way she totally understood, and has been asking me about our firewall.
Here’s Jake’s take on the game, in his own words (and a few of mine):
So there you have it. Learning is always easier when it’s fun, and these are such important concepts for kids to learn early. They’re growing up with this stuff. I want cyber security to be as second nature to Jake as putting a quarter in my sneaker for an emergency phone call was for me.
You can get Hax Attacks for iPhone ($0.99) and iPad ($1.99).
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has Compensation Levels of 1 & 13. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Turning Big Brother Off
Sep 18, 2012 Kids
The first week and a half of school, dealing with my son’s commute, was rough. First, there was just getting my mind into a place where my son was going to be commuting to a totally different neighborhood on the bus each day. Then there was the stress of him getting lost, and of forgetting to text and let us know where he was.
Each time something happened, my gut told me he was fine. But still, despite all of my big talk, I was having trouble just letting it go and assuming that he was fine. That first day when he did his commute alone, and forgot to text when he got to school (my husband’s idea, but something I willingly went along with), I spent a lot of time breathing deeply. I did not panic, but only because I was forcing myself not to. Even though everything I knew about myself was telling me he had simply forgotten to text and was fine, I really wasn’t OK until I was able to confirm that he was, indeed, at school.
So, we turned on the locator service for his cell phone. It’s something that hadn’t really occurred to me, but after that first snafu I thought the locator would give me peace of mind.
It did not. Instead, it became a crutch. A crutch I didn’t need but was using anyway.
When he was taking longer than usual to get home last Thursday, I checked his location several times. I could see that he was moving down the correct street fast, which meant that he was on the bus, just where he should be. Then, he got off and the little locator dot went the wrong way. What? Should I call him? I told myself to relax – he was probably going to the store for a snack.
Then, last Friday, he forgot to text when he got to school again. I searched for his location, but instead of reassuring me that he was in school, the locator put him in a neighborhood in the opposite direction from where his school is.
This time, I knew that my gut was right, that he was at school. That the locator couldn’t find him in his cold-war-era bomb shelter of a school, and it was confused.
So here we had two things that I was supposed to be able to rely on to tell me if he was in school: the ability of an eleven-year-old boy to do something consistently that I probably wouldn’t remember to do half the time, and an app that likes to mislead me for fun.
I decided on Friday that it had to stop. I wasn’t being the parent I wanted to be. When I was a kid, and I walked out the door for school, my parents assumed I’d gotten there just fine unless told otherwise. Now, it’s the other way around: we had set things up so that we were assuming something had gone wrong unless we got confirmation that everything had gone right. It didn’t feel good.
I told my husband at dinner that night that I wanted to stop the texting, stop the locating. Now, I think he and I are pretty much on the same page about the freedoms we want our kids to have, but he gets there just a little slower than I do. He wasn’t ready to just assume everything was OK. He didn’t see the harm in keeping track of where Jake was this way, but that’s because he wasn’t the one stressing if a text wasn’t sent or a dot wasn’t in the right location.
So, I told him that if he wanted to take over, that would work for me. When Jake goes back to school tomorrow after the long weekend, he’ll text his dad when he gets there. I no longer have the password for the locator site, so I can’t check up on Jake. I have faith that he will be, within reason, where he says he will be. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be letting him do this commute, no matter how we could check up on him.
He’s eleven. If he wants to swing by a store or the library after school, he should. If he’s going to be unusually late, he should call – just like I had to. And he has it so easy, with a cell phone. And if I really really need to get him, I can call that cell phone.
I’m embarrassed by my behavior last week. I don’t understand why we don’t automatically allow our kids the same freedoms we had when we were their age. Instead it’s a fight against our guts, a fight against logic, a fight against safety statistics, and most of all a fight against having faith in our kids.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: cell phone, commute, safety
There’s a 62% chance I’m going to die in my house
Jul 18, 2012 Paid/Sponsored Post
[This giveaway is now closed. Congratulations to the winner, Kayla.]
[This post was commissioned by Kidde]
OK, that’s not exactly true. It might be worse: given my clumsy nature I’m sure my odds are way higher than that. I mean, we have four staircases in our house, and I’ve fallen down every one of them. But I have to somehow make fun of the fact that I scored a pathetic 38% when I completed a Home Safety Challenge survey from Kidde, the people who make the very cool talking smoke and CO alarmswe’ve had in our house for almost five years (I’ll be giving one away at the end of this post.) Now, in fairness, there’s a huge section of the survey having to do with children’s safety, and most of the questions were geared towards homes with younger children. We don’t have outlet covers and window safety bars and stair safety gates and all that stuff anymore, and I think the survey could have done a better job of funneling parents of older children past those questions. If I discount those questions I do score higher. But I still don’t get a passing grade. Like I said, pathetic.
My weak points
My weakest points in the survey mostly had to do with getting out of the house in case of a fire. There are many rooms that simply don’t have a safe egress. And I did try: when we moved into our very tall house I bought escape ladders for the 2nd, 3rd and 4th floors. But along with a tall, old house we also have very old, very wide windowsills, and the escape ladders don’t work with them. So for six years they’ve been sitting in boxes, while I’ve procrastinated getting hooks installed near the windows in case, God forbid, we should need to escape that way. But there was always something else to spend our house renovation money on. I’m also not as good as I could be about testing my alarms and changing the batteries. I’ve gotten complacent because my alarms are hard-wired, so instead of changing the batteries every six months I wait until the alarm tells me to. That’s not very smart, because if we lose power and the alarms have to run on battery power for a while, those batteries should be new-ish and ready to go! To make it worse, once our alarms let us know that we need to get out, we don’t have a meeting place. And I’ve never had a fire drill with the kids. And while I’m proud of myself for having fire extinguishers on every floor, some of them are more than ten years old, and I don’t know which ones, and I’ve never practiced using one anyway and probably couldn’t in a fire-induced panic!
Read the rest of this entry »
NYC gets a cool new taxi, but misses some big opportunities
Apr 4, 2012 Around NYC
The new Nissan NV200 (photo courtesy of Nissan)
Last night I went to a press conference introducing New York City’s latest taxi, the Nissan NV200. NYC taxis are always an adventure. You never know if you’re going to get a taxi with a flooded floor, one that smells like feet, a driver who has no clue where he’s going and gets both of you hopelessly lost, or who talks for half an hour about why he wears a tinfoil hat at home (all things that have happened to me since moving to NYC). This new taxi could have a positive impact on three of those situations.
The taxi itself is beautiful, and big. While it won’t seat more people than current cabs, those passengers will be a lot more comfortable. The rear compartment has these features:
Win a basket of goodies from Schwinn
Dec 17, 2010 Contest/Giveaway
Schwinn has a great charity promotion going for the holidays: every time someone sends one of their e-carols, it helps Schwinn donate a bike and helmet to a kid in need (through local Boys and Girls Clubs), up to $65,000 worth! The carols are really cute, and the site even has a little video showing how they took regular bells with the tones needed for the carols and turned them into bike bells.
Schwinn has put together three really helpful videos, whether you’re buying a bike…
How to Properly Size and Fit Your Child on a Bike. from MFA on Vimeo.
or already have one…
Bicycle Safety for Your Child from MFA on Vimeo.
How to Trick Out Your Bike out with a basket, Streamers and a Bell. from MFA on Vimeo.
They’re also providing a basket of bike-related prizes, worth almost $100, for one of my lucky readers! The prize includes a Schwinn Girls Bike Helmet and Knee Pads, Schwinn Boys Codex Youth Helmet, Schwinn Halogen Light Value Pack, Schwinn Bike Bells, and a Schwinn wicker basket.
To enter, all you have to do is answer one of the following questions:
- 1) What’s your favorite bike memory? It can be from when you were a kid, or with your own kids.
- 2) What’s your best safety tip for riding a bike?
Your comment will only count if it answers one of the two questions (and no, typing “Pick me!” does not count as an answer).
For a second entry, you may tweet about this contest with a link back to this page. Or, you can copy and tweet the following:
Enter to win a great basket full of bike-related prizes, worth almost $100, from #Schwinn and @SelfishMom! http://bit.ly/eeMWvy
Make sure to leave a second comment with a link to your tweet, or it won’t count (instructions on how to find and post the url of your tweet can be found here).
So, that’s a maximum of two entries per household please! This contest will close at noon-ish on Wednesday December 22nd. The winner will be chosen by random.org. You must be at least 18 years of age to enter. Prizes may be shipped within the continental United States only. See my complete Giveaway Rules page for more information.
Good luck!
Please note that Selfish Mom was paid to administer this giveaway.
UPDATE: This giveaway is now closed. Thanks to all who entered.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 11. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, and Momtourage, and podcasts with The Blogging Angels.
