Tag: small children

milkmynk:

klefable:

i love little kids that share too much information. today a girl came in with her mom to order food and i told her i liked her dress. she said “thanks my mom stole it from target”

Mom, chatting to family : “Oh, that dress was on sale at Target for 80% off! It was an absolute steal!”

Little girl, internally memos : “Mom stole this dress”

child handling for the childless nurse

pervocracy:

My current job has me working with children, which is kind of a weird shock after years in environments where a “young” patient is 40 years old.  Here’s my impressions so far:

Birth – 1 year: Essentially a small cute animal.  Handle accordingly; gently and affectionately, but relying heavily on the caregivers and with no real expectation of cooperation.

Age 1 – 2: Hates you.  Hates you so much.  You can smile, you can coo, you can attempt to soothe; they hate you anyway, because you’re a stranger and you’re scary and you’re touching them.  There’s no winning this so just get it over with as quickly and non-traumatically as possible.

Age 3 – 5: Nervous around medical things, but possible to soothe.  Easily upset, but also easily distracted from the thing that upset them.  Smartphone cartoons and “who wants a sticker?!!?!?” are key management techniques.

Age 6 – 10: Really cool, actually.  I did not realize kids were this cool.  Around this age they tend to be fairly outgoing, and super curious and eager to learn.  Absolutely do not babytalk; instead, flatter them with how grown-up they are, teach them some Fun Gross Medical Facts, and introduce potentially frightening experiences with “hey, you want to see something really cool?”

Age 11 – 14: Extremely variable.  Can be very childish or very mature, or rapidly switch from one mode to the other.  At this point you can almost treat them as an adult, just… a really sensitive and unpredictable adult.  Do not, under any circumstances, offer stickers.  (But they might grab one out of the bin anyway.)

Age 15 – 18: Basically an adult with severely limited life experience.  Treat as an adult who needs a little extra education with their care.  Keep parents out of the room as much as possible, unless the kid wants them there.  At this point you can go ahead and offer stickers again, because they’ll probably think it’s funny.  And they’ll want one.  Deep down, everyone wants a sticker.

glumshoe:

I can’t do justice to one of the weirdest camp stories I know. My friend tells it so well, and I can offer only a pale shadow of his story.

Last summer, he was working with one of the younger units comprised of ten year old boys. They had spent the night camping on another beach and were just readying themselves to depart. “Make sure you have all your things!” called my friend. “Don’t leave anything behind!”

One small boy came up, dragging a massive tangle of decomposing seaweed behind him. “But… what about me boy?” he asked, lip trembling.

“…what is ‘me boy’?”

The child held up the stinking wad of bull kelp. “This is him. This is Me Boy.”

“Me Boy is not coming back with us,” said his counselor. “You’re going to leave Me Boy behind on the beach where he belongs.”

The campers loudly mourned the loss of Me Boy. They insisted on giving him a Viking burial at sea, which just consisted of pushing him solemnly off the back of the rowboat into the water and watching him drift away in the surf.

That was only the beginning. Me Boy would be back.

The campers, in true camp fashion, possessed some kind of cultic hive-mind and a predisposition for bizarre memes. Me Boy would not be forgotten. They started telling each other stories about Me Boy and how he would one day rise again. There were warring factions with contradicting dogmas about Me Boy. Only when the gardener allowed them to take home a zucchini she had harvested did they find their god, born anew.

Me Boy, The Zucchini That Was A God, became the whole unit’s mascot. The kids would bicker over who got to carry him. They built nests and carriers for Me Boy and brought him to different activities, fiercely defending him from those that would do him harm. One child appointed himself the Voice of Me Boy and would translate the zucchini’s divine wishes into human speech.

It got out of hand. Me Boy had become a distraction, a fixation, a violent controversy. Something had to be done.

My friend, their counselor, took it upon himself to kill Me Boy. The children wailed in despair as he chopped their God into refreshing slices. With this sudden turn of fortune, followers of Me Boy turned to theophagy. “We must eat him to preserve his power!” they cried. Boys who would otherwise never have touched a vegetable ate greedily of this sacrament, eager to let Me Boy live on within them.

For a time, it seemed that peace and order had been restored, and the religion had already faded into its silver age. But only for a time.

In the last few days of camp, the religion of Me Boy splintered into several denominations. Every meal yielded new vegetable matter said to be a reincarnation of Me Boy, only for opposing groups to dismiss these as false prophets. Some believed that Me Boy was gone. Others believed his spirit lived on, intangible, omnipresent. Some believed he had found a new vessel inside a carrot, a pear, a slice of cantaloupe… even inside a child. There was chaos, and strife, and heartbreak without the guidance of Me Boy.