life's a boar ...

One of our baby girls is fat, in the 99th percentile for her age. She is super cute and sweet. Lately, she has been sick with various breathing issues, so she has been reluctant to take her bottles. Normally, she’ll take 4 ounces of formula at lunch and 8 ounces in the afternoon. Today, I was lucky to get to her take 5 all day.

There was a substitute covering a lunch break in my classroom today. We emphasized to her that we need to keep trying to get the baby to drink her bottle until she finished it. She said, “Why are you guys so worried about taking her bottle?”

My coworker replied, “That’s where all her nutrients are. She needs the nutrients and the water.”

To which the substitute replied, “But she’s so fat. She doesn’t need it.”

By starving her. She insisted that her baby was ‘too fat’ and had an aim to remove any and all ‘chubbyness’ so her baby would be thin. She’d already been warned by her doctor about the baby not getting enough food, but insisted she knew best.

After several months of this her baby passed out cold one day and was rushed into hospital where the doctors found her to have severe malnutrition, a low body temperature and low pulse rate. They asked my cousin what she’d been feeding her daughter and she said “one bottle of skimmed milk a day. I don’t want her growing up fat.”

Even after nearly killing her daughter my cousin maintained her view that fat = bad and ended up with all her kids taken from her because she was starving them and neglecting them.

When your fatphobia leads you to starving your own children then you’ve got serious problems.

Is

Real

She backed off saying, ‘Well he looks fine!” – proving once again that weight bias is not truly about health – But I know many other parents who are not as informed as I am about weight science and size diversity would react to this interaction by policing their child’s food intake, if not as an infant, then when he was an older child. This is exactly the type of seemingly-inconsequential interaction that starts the ball rolling on a lifetime of dieting, disordered eating, negative body image, and weight-based abuse for too many fat people.

Years later when he was five, another doctor measured his weight and height and commented that he is off the charts on both, but “at least he is in proportion.” And if he was not “in proportion,” I am sure I would have been advised once again to “watch his weight.” 

I no longer allow healthcare providers to weight my children unless it is absolutely medically necessary. They are unable to control their weight talk, which is a known harm for children.

1. The 4 years old daughter of a friend of mine came to our house to spend the weekend. She gave me a letter from her mom that said that the child was in a glutenfree diet because she was getting ‘awfully fat’ when eating cookies or bread (my celiac ass; who gets dhiarrea and loses a scary amount of weight whenever I eat something with gluten was like ’???’).

You can bet that I went to the supermarket with the kid and told her ‘go & take whatever you feel like eating’ and the poor child came back smiling with her arms full of biscuits and cupcakes.

She didn’t got sick (as a celiac would get) and told me later that she hated the diet her mother made her follow; because her cousins didn’t had to pass through that.

And what’s the scariest thing about this story? Her mother was a NURSE. A fucking nurse who didn’t have a clue of the harm that she was doing to her daughter’s body!

2. My little sister started to feel fatigued and dizzy at 9 years old. She felt nauseated at the sight of food and had abdominal pain that increased with physical activity.

Mom got her to the ER and the doctor dismissed it saying: ‘she’s fat and probably is feeling ill after eating too much burgers, get her to make some exercise and she will be better in no time’.My mom didn’t felt ok with the diagnosis and took my sister with a second doctor who also told her that ‘the child was just fat’.

My sister’s skin was starting to get yellow as the days passed and the abdominal pain was getting awful so my mom (heaven bless her!) got her to the ER for the third time:

SHE HAD STAGE 4 HEPATITIS AND WAS ABOUT TO DIE.

She survived after a long and painful recovery who involved being in bed for a whole year (remember that we’re speaking of a 9 years old child). Luckily they saved her liver and she didn’t went through a transplant… but let this sink:

If it weren’t for my mother, fatphobia would have killed her. Fatphobia kills kids and teenagers, fatphobia kills inocent people everyday. It treats human beings as lesser than others and hurts them in their most vulnerable times.

FUCKING TAKE NOTE OF THIS!

BORING SELF CARE series.

🗑📞💷💊🚿📩🚽📎

The next few days I’m going to share drawings about how self care is often really really dull and unenjoyable. And not the “tumblr” kind of self care which is often lovely but not always real. Sometimes you just need to have clean clothes in your draws. Even though these things often build up in your mind the actual doing is often not as bad (unless obviously you are low on spoons 🥄, which is another discussion really as picking up your clothes off the floor may use energy you need to say, feed yourself. ) What are your boring things you do which are self care? #boringselfcare

Please note, I have three friends all from different regions of this country, so the list may be a little jumbled with regional words. Oh well!

Here are some Austrian words and phrases for you guys. From personal experience, the Austrians love when you attempt their dialect, they get very impressed!

BASIC PHRASES

servas → hello / goodbye (like ‘ciao’)

seas → hey

grias di → friendly greeting

auf Wiedaschaun → goodbye

pfiat di → bye

baba → bye

dere → bye (really slangy)

bis speda → see you later

schen Tog nu → have a good day

guade Nocht → good night

wie gehts dia → how are you

mia gehts ____ → I’m ____

(gaunz) guad / schlecht → (really) good / bad

miad → tired

i a → me too

und dia? → and you?

wos mochsd grod? → what are you doing?

nix → nothing

i a ned → me neither

jo → yes

na → no

vülleicht → maybe

i was ned → I don’t know

wos mansd? → what do you mean?

danke → thanks

daunksche → thank you very much

bitte → you’re welcome

imma wieda gern → you’re welcome

tschuldigung → excuse me

es duad ma lad → I’m sorry

ka Problem → no problem

PERSONAL PRONOUNS

[Austrian first]

i, mi, mia → ich, mich, mir

du, di, dia → du, dich, dir

er, erm, erm → er, ihn, ihm

sie, sie, ia → sie, sie, ihr

es, es, erm → es, es, ihm

mia, uns, uns → wir, uns, uns

sie, sie, erna → sie, sie, ihnen

ia, eich, eich → ihr, euch, euch

(IN)DIRECT ARTICLES

[Austrian first]

da → der

de → die

des → das

a → ein / eine

an → einen

ana → einer

TIME WORDS

hiaza → now

gestan → yesterday

heid → today

moang → tomorrow

boid → soon

speda → later

nexte Woche → next week

nexts Joa → next year

NUMBERS

ans 1

zwa 2

drei 3

via 4

fünf 5

sex 6

siem 7

ocht 8

nei 9

zehn 10

나는 졸려요 - I’m sleepy 

As some of you may know, I’ve been doing a giveaway and it’s almost over! It’s not too late to enter though! A quick recap: reblog + follow = 1 entry, youtube sub + screen cap = 2 extra entries. Easy right? I’ll choose a winner in 3 days, and contact them directly! (I will double check that the winner is still subbed or following ^^) So good luck and hopefully you’ll hear from me soon! :)

>.>

“Traditional Maasai lifestyle centres around their cattle which constitute their primary source of food. The measure of a man’s wealth is in terms of cattle and children. A herd of 50 cattle is respectable, and the more children the better. A man who has plenty of one but not the other is considered to be poor.[37] A Maasai religious belief relates that God gave them all the cattle on earth, leading to the belief that rustling cattle from other tribes is a matter of taking back what is rightfully theirs, a practice that has become much less common.[38]”

Shit, down here in Brazil we not only offered to send tracking units and doctors to help in 9/11 but we wanted to send a whole lot of donations to help with Katrina (we have experience with floods down here so we knew what kind of medicine to send to prevent outbreaks). 

We alone had like 2 army airplanes full of medicine and non-perishables like baby formula, diapers, bottled water, mosquito nets and other stuff that’s needed to fight opportunistic diseases that hit flooded areas, enough to assist a good few thousand people at least, ready to go the day after it hit, but your government refused the donations. 

The same thing happened to the Canadians and Europeans who offered help, the US embassies around the world told us all to give money to Red Cross.

And so we did, we all gave hundreds of millions of dollars to them, and then this happened:

Red Cross scandals tarnish relief efforts

‘Breathtaking’ Waste and Fraud in Hurricane Aid

I didn’t know that other countries tried to help after 9/11 or Katrina. Like, that’s something we, the people, should hear about and we don’t.

Most the time, when people say “oh FEMA or something sent people right?” re: fires, its actually people from other countries showing up and kinda ignoring the government telling them to fuck off and staying on behalf of local departments because we REALLY need them. 

If there’s a huge ass disaster, and the government is sitting there with a thumb up it’s ass, help is offered and most the time– shit, it gets there! But then the feds do something really fucking dirty. They insist they were the help, if it’s talked about at all. 

They insist those people putting out fires were federal people, because to most people a fireman’s a fireman. The people handing out water and food, a relief worker is a relief worker. So on and so forth. 

We had people come up when the fires were so bad a while ago– not the Australians, but i think there was like a German group of like 3 guys that flew themselves over? They came out of sheer “this is horrible and we’re helping” and my dad [local fire chief] had them working with our guys and the feds lost no time telling every news outlet that it was THEIR people doing all the fire knockdowns and structure work when these guys were running into buildings and grabbing people, pets, and people’s important documents because they knew papers were a pain in the ass to replace. 

What you gotta understand is that our government is very intent on selling us and the rest of the world [as much as possible] the idea of a powerful and self reliant country. All our reporting on disasters, starts with the scaremongering and then moves to “but our people can handle it because we’re the best at handling things” and then they move on before the idea it’s out of control comes to mind. The average person outside of the disaster has no idea, if they have never been around such an event or met someone who regularly deals with these things, they will kinda probably nod along with that. Because we have no real scope on the scale and impact– by design. Our media intake is very controlled to slant everything to the “eh, we can handle it and everyone else out there– they need our help because they’re not so good at handling disasters like we are.” People who know better, reading international news, interacting with international social groups, looking outside their sphere of community– we know better but that kinda slant is really hard to break from because of that grip American media has on information. So, taking that knowledge, we further have restricted reporting on certain disasters because they’re considered unimportant.  Hurricanes are considered important, earthquakes are only considered important if it wrecks something the government cares about or somewhere a couple million people live that they’ll upset the national money flow/they can throw money at someone to make the news care, floods are only important if it’s in a similar manner to earthquakes but since they occur annually they’re rarely reported on nationally, mudslides that kill people or leave hundreds homeless aren’t important to the government even through they happen constantly, wildfires that consume most of the nation/continent each year generally are unimportant until they consume a town or threaten a government interest/money flow location. Terrorist attacks are always important because people will talk about them.

So, when we do get help for any of the above, it’s possible that most people may have no idea about what’s happened, let alone that help’s been sent. Or if people know something happened, the details are vague– the news don’t care to give the nitty gritty. You’ll know something happened and people are suffering and “gee, isn’t it good you’re not them” and then now the weather.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_response_to_Hurricane_Katrina 

Pita Grace: Daily Ab Routine

Thank you all for supporting this blog! I never imagined when I started that I would hit 5,000 but here we are :) As thanks to all of you readers, I have decided to do a giveaway~ 

The prizes (three winners; each gets everything listed below)

1 Korean textbook or other book (novel, etc.)(your choice) 

1 notebook (random) 

2 원고지 pads (one of each color)

2 Dong-A 3-Zero 0.38 pens (my current favs <3)

4 Java Duplex highlighters (also my favorite highlighters <3)(all different colors, random)

The rules

You must be following me~

ONE entry per person please!

You should send me an ask or message otherwise telling me 

what your level is 

why you’re learning Korean and 

what you think you can improve on the most!

You must be okay with giving me your address! If you are a minor, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE ask your parents first~

Please have your ask or messages or SOMETHING open so I can contact you. I will notify the winners in a blog post and by PM as well. If I can’t contact you, I’ll have to give your prize to someone else :<

The entry period for the giveaway is 10am KST June 1st to 10am KST June 14th! No entries received after that time will be accepted, sorry!

The two male leads both suffer from mental illnesses

The male lead has very severe schizophrenia

He also has PTSD and can only sleep in his bathtub

His friend (the second male) has Tourette’s which is consistently portrayed 

They DO NOT HOLD BACK on the ableist statements and remarks posed to the characters at all

Nearing the end of the drama the male lead completely loses his grasp on reality with a severe relapse 

Neither character gets miraculously 100% cured (both are indicated to still take medication) 

They make peace with their illnesses and it’s a happy ending

Delicate Illustrations of South Korean Corner Stores

Artist Me Kyeoung Lee reminisces her childhood days through her artworks that highlight convenience stores and corner shops nestled in South Korea.