2nd Grade

I've been subbing this week for a second grade teacher.  I love second grade.  I love kids.  I love teaching.  I love school.  The kids are so fantastically weird, and if I let them, they would talk to me all day and tell me crazy stories.  ALL DAY.  I am already too indulgent with them because I crave their crazy stories, so I'm afraid that there is a good chunk of our day spent with me sitting at the teacher's desk and the kids lined up under the pretense of getting individual help with their math or reading, but we actually all know that they are only lined up to tell me something strange that they dreamed about, or that they saw on TV or that their parent's did.

Yesterday I got a scene by scene retelling of a movie about a girl who got her arm bit off by a shark while surfing.  Surely the synopsis was a million times better than the actual movie because the girl that told it to me was so intensely involved in the telling, dramatic gestures and all.  This morning a boy told me all about the show Terra Nova.  Dinosaurs! Blood sucking worms! The jungle! Violence! Terror! (I can't believe what parents let their kids watch.)

This afternoon one boy was tired and had a bit of a meltdown that landed him in the hall.  I got so much secretive, unsolicited advice about how to handle it.  One girl told me she didn't want to see me get my feelings hurt so I should call the principal and let her handle things.  Another kid told me to make him sit in a time-out during afternoon recess by the bee hive.

The only thing I don't like about teaching is the hard schedule.  And the only reason I mind that is because (and forgive my bluntness) when a girl has to poop a girl has to poop.  And a girl can't say to 25 seven-year-olds, "Talk amongst yourselves for ten minutes or so while I drop the kids off at the pool," because it only takes about 90 seconds for them to devolve into a Lord of the Flies type scenario (re: time-outs by the bee hive).  So teaching makes me constipated.

I saw something incredibly strange today.  There is a student teacher working with another teacher and she is young and thin and beautiful, but today she was wearing the strangest thing.  She had on a normal, properly sized, oxford, button down shirt.  No pleats, no puffiness, nothing special.  What was weird was that she was wearing a thin leather braided belt around her rib cage.  Right under her boobs.  It looked so uncomfortable, and so weird!  Is this a new thing?  I've never seen anything like it so I was staring at her under-boobs all day wondering what-the-hell and I'm sure she just thinks I was staring at her boobs, which I kind of was.  So who's the strange one?

Sarah Lindahl Poops (yes she does, yes she does!)

Today I have a great job.  I'm subbing for an adult basic education teacher who is on vacation for two weeks.  She only teaches two days a week so for the next two weeks, Monday and Wednesday are going to be quiet and peaceful days.  And I get paid hourly at a wage that is twice the going rate for regular sub jobs.  Sweet!  I have spent my day leisurely helping people with GED preparation, or reading skills, and during the down times I have been reading or on the internet.  A few minutes ago I was looking at my stats page, and I looked at the "recent keyword" analysis again which is the page that tells you exactly what people typed in to Google to get to your blog.  My mouth literally hung open when I saw the following:

Someone actually typed in the words "sarah lindahl poops" to google and got my blog.  I am dying of curiosity to know who wants to know about my pooping habits.  (Dad, was it you?)  So then I hit the link and this is what Google shoots back for anyone who googles "sarah lindahl poops":



There are FOUR entries that lead to my blog for anyone that wants to know about me and poop.  Wow.  I love the internet SO MUCH. 

UPDATE:

Ha ha, BETH.  I know this was you:

Bags of money, baseball, and fecal escapees: Washington DC, Day 1

Today was our first day in DC and it was fun, but I was just a tad bit hung over from my drinking binge from last night to calm my nerves and celebrate not dying and leaving poor Mitch a widower.  When we were about to leave I was running upstairs to grab one more thing and Kira said, "Will you grab my bag of money?"  Here's her bag of money:

It's about 8 pounds of dimes and nickels. 

We started off the day walking to the Metro and going to the Navy Yard.  The Metro was interesting with Kira.  She tried to get on every train she saw, and once we were on, she tried to get off at every stop.  Thank goodness I got her a phone.  Amy and I were joking after about the fourth time I grabbed her collar to keep her from getting on the wrong train, that she'd get on, the doors would shut, she'd see us out the window and then as she is whizzing off to the next station we'd see her open her phone to call us, and say, "Um...where are you guys?" 

We went to the Navy Yard and walked around and then went to the Navy Museum which was interesting.  After the museum we went to a baseball game.  Did you know Washington DC has a baseball team, the "Nationals?"  I didn't either!  We got hotdogs and other junk which is what going to a baseball game is really all about.  Now that I've seen real baseball I have a few beefs with the Wii version, which I'm pretty good at.  It's not the same.  I might not actually be good at baseball.  This was the first pro baseball game Kira ever went to.  I wouldn't call her a fan.  In about the middle of the first inning she said, "Has it started yet?" and then at the end of the first inning she said, "Can we go?"  We said that we were going to stay long enough to sing the song in the seventh inning stretch (which we had all been singing all morning) and Sam said, "What song?"  Not huge baseball fans.  When asked what their favorite part of the game was they both said, "When Teddy Roosevelt body slammed the sausage," which taken out of context sounds INSANE, but that actually happened during the mascot race.  Three sausages were kicking the presidents' asses until Teddy caught up and body slammed one of them and that sort of took the wind out of the other sausages' sails and George Washington won. 

After the game we went to the Mall and walked through the Air and Space museum.  Sam LOVED it.  He wants to go again and spend a whole day.  I think he could probably go there every day and not get tired of it.  He liked the "fecal bags" that the astronauts had to use, complete with two finger sleeves to cut the feces off in a scissor-like motion, and he loved when I told him that "fecal escapees" are a bit of a problem in space. 

You think it looks so easy?  You try it.

It's true.  I read it in the book Packing for Mars by Mary Roach.  It's hard to poop in zero gravity.  "Fecal escapee" is Sam's new favorite phrase. 

Then we came home and made pizza and sat around and watched TV.

I missed you!

OH MY GOD!  I haven't had internet for days and days!  I can get email on my phone and if I'm absolutely desperate I can get on the internet and look at blogs on my phone too, but the screen: she's so very very tiny, it was hard.  I don't know what the heck is wrong with our wi-fi.  It's really starting to get on my nerves.  Anyhoo, since I had no internet service I did things like clean the house, and pay attention to my children, and read books.  BOOORRRIIINNNGGG!!!  Just kidding.  I finished reading Roots and like I've mentioned before, it was hard to read because of how horrible slavery is, so after I finished it I thought, I have to read something totally different, and hopefully lighter.  So I picked up a book I got for Christmas and it was about a mother and a daughter.  Sweet!  I have a daughter!  But after I got into it, I realized it was mostly about the Holocaust.  You know what's more horrible than mid 19th century Southern white slave owners?  Nazis.  Hello again, nightmares!

Last night I went to book club, and I have to say, I love my new book club.  Sure, the book we read was good and we talked about it and all; but we also talked about hot-flashes, fiber-intake (complete with a sample of our hostess's delicious chewable fiber pills), public farting, the Bristol Stool Scale (which I forgot the name of so just googled "broman's poop chart" and got the desired results.  I love you, Google!)

When Dana brought up the poop chart on her computer for us to see, I was pretty proud because I am number one all the way, and number one is the best right?

 Apparently not.  A person should be aiming for number four.  Yeah, that's right.  Number four. 

Then we talked and talked about all kinds of stuff, and one of the ladies told the funniest story.  She said when she was young she heard a joke that she didn't get, but everyone who heard it laughed at it, so she laughed too, and later when she was having dinner with her parents she thought they might like to hear the funny joke.  The joke was "What is better than roses on your piano?  Tulips on your organ."  (get it, two lips).  She told the joke to her parents and then laughed and laughed, and not until years later did she finally get the joke and was immediately mortified that she told an oral sex joke to her parents at the dinner table. 

I'm still laughing about it.

These are the people in your neighborhood

There is a little grocery store down the road from our house, right next to Kira's school.  It's owned by a couple, and the wife half of the couple is so nice and so pretty and smart etc. etc. that I've always liked her/admired her/ been intimidated by her.  But I mostly like her and for some reason it's important to me that she doesn't think of me as an idiot.  I've always tried to be on my best behavior in all my dealings with her because I think of her as such a quality person, but today I ruined 12 years of the "I'm not a freak" foundation I've been building with her.

I stopped by after work to get some bread.  No, let's go back a step:  This afternoon I worked teaching a fifth grade class, and if you have been reading the blog long enough, you know that I have shy bowels and the more I work, the less I poop, and when that happens, let's just say that nobody wins.  So I've been working all this week, and it's Thursday afternoon.  See where I'm going with this?  I have a lot of gas, which I didn't expel around people at school on purpose because I'm classy like that, even though I've gotten step by step instructions on how to get away with public farting with nobody being the wiser.  As soon as I got in the car I let it all go in an impressive (if I do say so myself!) show of flatulence.  Oh my god, did I feel better!  Then as I was driving along the road I saw the little store and I thought, "Hey!  I need bread!" so I stopped.

I went in the store, got the bread, and then noticed that they had 12 packs of diet coke on sale so I picked up four.  I went to pay and the pretty owner-lady was running the cash register and she insisted that I be helped outside with my hoard of coke and bread, which is fine because I thought she'd just call one of her teenage stock people, but no, she insisted on helping me herself, which I thought was nice because hey, maybe she likes me!  Tee hee!  I thought that all my diligent efforts towards normalcy around her has finally paid off and maybe we could someday be friends!  But then when I opened my car door for us to put my coke in, we were enveloped by my stench which had somehow concentrated and smelled like a dead ferret in a vat of sun-warmed, week-old, boiled eggs.  I was immediately totally humiliated and thought to myself, "She can't smell it!  We're outside!  The wind is blowing!" but then I saw her stop breathing out of her nose and start breathing out of her mouth and I wanted to die.  DIE, I tell you!  What do you say in that situation:  "I didn't know pop was on sale or else I would have held it in a little longer?" or  "I really have to poop?"  or "WHAT!?"  None of those seemed appropriate so I just didn't say anything at all.

Why did it have to be the grocery woman that I for some reason have a lady-crush on?  Why couldn't it have been that awful woman who works at the pharmacy who punches the touch screen with her fingernails?  Or anyone at Sam's Club?  Why do I constantly have to humiliate myself in front of people I want to impress?  This is why I don't have friends.

Your toilet is all wrong, did you know?

Mitch is always sharing little factoids with me and most of the time they are outrageous lies, but every once in a while he gets me with a whopper of truth that is so unbelievable that I call him a liar and then I feel bad when I research it and find out it is true.

Like the time he told me there was a cow at the University of Minnesota that had a window in its side so you could see its insides at work.  I didn't believe it.  Come on!  Who would?  But it was true.  There really was a cow at the U of M with a window in its side.  How did I find out?  Mitch's brother Mat told me it was true.  Mat told me that there was also a pig at the U of M that had gloves in its side so students could stick their hands inside a live pig and feel what the organs and insides are like.  He was totally convincing.  He said the only problem was that when the pig got gas the gloves would shoot out like arms.  Then Mitch and Mat both cracked up laughing and I knew it wasn't true.  Then Mat said, "But the cow is true," and I believed it, because I was too exhausted to be skeptical.  They wore me down. I have been telling people about the cow with a window for years, but when I looked it up for this post, I can find nothing on it so now I'm doubting if that is true at all.  I'll have to talk to Mitch about this.

Anyway, the cow/pig with a window/arms is not what this post is about.  Mitch's factoid today was that Americans are sorely lacking in muscle development because of our toilets.  I said, "What!" in sarcastic disbelief.  He said squatting is a much healthier way of going to the bathroom, and in many parts of the world this is how people do it.  Yeah, right.  They don't have toilets?  Puh-lease.  So I looked it up.  I found this site and it turns out he's right.  (god, I hate that so much)

I really had no idea about this phenomenon of squat toilets in other parts of the world. Look at the pictures I found:

Amazing.  This is a picture of a public toilet in Japan.  See, it's true!
How do you use it, you ask?
I'll show you:

Well, I won't personally, but this guy who kept his pants on and his back turned for our little demonstration will.  See that squat?  That's apparently a better way for you to go.  It develops your leg muscles and it's better for your intestines too. Things tend not to get so "bunched up." (Although accidental stall walk-ins would be horrible for both parties.  You can't really reach out to hold the door shut and say, "Occupado!"  when your back is turned and the door swings out.  You'd just have to sit there and beg the intruder to shut the door, which I'm sure they would right away because who wants to see that?)

"But Sarah," you ask, "I'm American and have never gone in a squatting way unless you count that time I went in the woods because it was an emergency and I pooped on the strap of my overalls, and that was a bad experience I would not like to repeat, thank you very much. Besides, I can't really squat anyway unless I totally remodel my bathroom, right?"  Wrong!  You could get one of these: 

This is called "Natures Platform" and with it you can climb up to your pot every day and work those leg muscles.  Wouldn't that be better than stupid Jillian Michaels and her 30 Day Shred?  

Here's another model of a squatter.  This one is in France.  Where's the toilet paper, you ask?  Well, I don't know.  I don't know where the toilet paper is.  I really hope it's somewhere.

This is such a common international phenomenon that places with toilets like the lame one you use have to put these signs up so happy people with well developed leg muscles and non-bunched intestines won't step on the toilet seat and dirty it up with their shoes.

Aren't you glad Mitch shared this with me today?