Uhm. since when did thrift have a vegetable department?

Lots of Potato Heads at local thrift. I DUNNO WHY but I wanna kno!!

The fun part of a Potato Head is mixing and matching different accessories. The accessories are no longer sold separately from the potato base, you have to buy a whole new Potato Head any time you want to add it’s accessories to your collection. In our playroom we have a huge basket full of accessories we’ve collected and 1 potato base per child; in our basements we have a huge box of extra unused potato bases that we’ve stripped the accessories off of. Looks to me like a family with a similar set up to ours donated their extras box.

What it’s like to be slut-shamed when buying birth control

If an employee in a pharmacy makes a snide comment - Front store workers, pharmacists, or Pharmacy Techs give you shit? Gently (Or not so gently) remind them that the waiver they signed upon being hired legally binds them from commenting on your purchase, as it is a violation of privacy laws. Doing so is grounds for INSTANT termination and hefty fines.

Pharmacy workers (white coats) are legally obligated to ASK if you need an explanation of how medication works and any side effects, any medication conflicts etc. If you decline, THEY ARE NOT ALLOWED AT ALL TO MAKE SNIDE REMARKS OR FARTHER COMMENT ON YOUR PURCHASE. FRONT STORE EMPLOYEES CAN NOT AT ALL COMMENT IN ANY WAY, IN ANY STORE WITH A PHARMACY IN IT.

Know your rights. If this shit happens? Call them the fuck out and ask to speak to a manager. Get worked up. Cause a scene. Threaten a Lawsuit. If you see this happening to someone else, and they seem to be struggling, speak up for them. 

My hubs had a doctor who would not prescribe me contraception because it was against his religion.

I don’t have a belly button - it was surgically removed in the process of treating Crohn’s disease that progressed to life-threatening peritonitis about four years ago.

This isn’t a story about a belly button, or about intestines or any lack thereof. This is about the United States.

As part of a ‘getting to know you’ exercise a few weeks ago, a group of people and I were playing ‘two truths and a lie.’ For my turn, my lie was ‘I used to live in Canada.’ I was called on immediately after the game was over for confirmation that my statement ‘I don’t have a belly button’ was true.

I complied immediately, revealing a set of long purple scars that stretch across my abdomen - one of which crosses through the midline, no belly button in sight.

I gave a condensed version of the story and the general consensus was ‘bro, sick.’ Except for one guy, who looked utterly horrified.

“Wait,” he said slowly, something clearly dawning on him, “how are you going to have kids?”

This threw me for a second, but I’m used to being asked that question - my abdomen is full of scar tissue, I’m missing some key organs, the medicine I’m taking to stay in remission is a known abortifacient and I may well not be able to have children. I’ve discussed it before, but generally not with strangers.

“Uh,” I replied. “Well, that’s a complicated question. There are a lot of factors and I don’t really know.”

“No, no,” he insisted. “You don’t have a belly button.”

“What?”

“Isn’t that how the baby… you know, eats?”

“I’m sorry?”

“So like, the baby couldn’t get food. Because there’s nowhere for the umbilical cord to connect.”

“Wait,” I said, deeply confused. “Like, how was I born? This is recent, I was born with a belly button. I lost it like fourteen years after being born, there wasn’t a conflict.”

“No, I get that, but if you had a baby, there would be nowhere for the umbilical cord to connect and it wouldn’t get food. You don’t have a belly button so there’s nowhere to connect.”

I paused for a second, the realization dawning on me that this guy had a winning combination of no boundaries and literally no idea how pregnancy worked.

“Dude,” another guy cut in, “that’s not how it works.”

“That’s how babies get belly buttons, man,” the first guy insisted.

“The umbilical cord is a source of nutrients, yeah, but they’re stored in the placenta,” I offered. “That’s a totally different organ.”

“Then why do the mom and the baby both have belly buttons?”

The second guy was getting kind of upset, but I was totally beyond that - this guy had graduated high school and was heading off to college to study political science and didn’t have a clue where babies come from. It was actually comical.

I decided to interrupt and change the subject before anything got heated.

“What do you want to do after college?” I asked the first guy.

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess I just want to be a politician - like, public policy, that sort of thing. Run for office, you know.”

I’ve heard nothing but horror stories about sex ed here in the states, not just from fellow Americans, and outsiders laughing at us online, but friends and family as well. There was a heated argument just earlier today about how “vulva” isn’t a real word and that “vagina” is where pubic hair grows (news to some of my fellow Americans, but the vagina does not grow hair. The vulva and pubic mound does.)

There’s a sex educator named Lindsey Doe online who devotes a lot of her time to educating and debunking sex myths perpetuated here in the states by people who don’t understand how sex works, or what masturbation is.

There’s a high percentage of women in the united states who will never orgasm in their entire lives, not because of any sort of medical condition, but because they aren’t aware that they can masturbate, or where their clitoris is, or how to interact with it, or their romantic partner doesn’t.

There’s a disturbingly high percentage of women in the united states who aren’t aware that they have a urethra at all.

There’s so many men out there – grown men, who think people give birth through the anus. 

There are men out there who think that breasts inflate or get erect when a woman is aroused, like a penis.

More than half of men in the US think women can “hold in” their period like pee.

There are men and women out there who have no idea how semen works, and who try things like “jumping up and down” as contraceptive because “the sperm will fall out and thus not get you pregnant” or that you can use drugs to “make the sperm go to sleep”

A man in my home state of North Carolina pulled my father aside once, distressed that his purebred dog mated with a mutt. But he wasn’t distressed about the fact her puppies were going to be mutts, he was distressed because he thought she wouldn’t be purebred anymore. He wanted to know how many purebred dogs she would have to mate with before she’d be fully blooded again.

Which yeah, I know, I sound dumb here so let me elaborate:

She didn’t realize that in order to get HIV from unprotected sex, the person you are having sex with must be HIV positive, because it’s a virus that is transferred through the exchange of certain bodily fluids.

Oh no, she thought that the mere act of having unprotected sex could result in spontaneous STIs.

I was almost reluctant to tell her the truth, as this was clearly a person who should definitely not be having unprotected sex.

I know from just existing as a woman I didn’t know half the extremely big shit that happens to you when you’re pregnant.

Lots of women don’t realize that you almost certainly will tear your vagina during birth, and that a C-section is actually major surgery.

Mentioning 1/3 of all pregnancies are miscarried is taboo until a woman experiences it herself. This is actually why we generally don’t reveal pregnancies until several weeks on.

And the biggest of all: post-partum care. You bleed for a long while after you go home. There’s a very high chance of developing depression.

All this is not revealed to women generally until after they’re already pregnant. All this and the expectation is for everyone to have children. If we were educated on just how much pregnancy actually entails, a lot of women’s lives might be very very different.