When I was young, I did not walk five miles barefoot to get to the one room school house across town.
However, I did take the bus by myself, go to museums with my little brother (just the two of us), walk to school with my little brother when I was in grade 4 (he was in grade 3) and we also (gasp) ate peanut butter sandwiches for lunch-and nobody died from those sandwiches.
I did know kids and people who died, but those deaths were the result of age, disease or traffic accidents. And death sucks, and the death of young people especially sucks.
But I resent and personally revolt against the Helmet Head mentality. I think kids neat to eat a little dirt, play in the mud and have freedom from helicopter parents-in appropriate and incremental stages.
I have personally been reproached by an obese man at a public park for not making my kids wear helmets. He was just lucky my husband didn't hear him because he would have ended up getting slugged.
Yesterday, I had to take my special needs kid for a test and procedure (he's fine-thanks to all who asked).
Now, it used to be that at the children's hospital, they had a stash of cute, donated little mini-cars and red wagons to take kids from their parents in the pre-op room, toward the procedure and OR rooms. The kids could hang onto their favourite toy, take it in the little wagon or car and then be on their way. It was a less traumatizing little journey for the kids and made it easier on parents than going right into the procedure rooms.
I asked yesterday about the wagons and was told that a health and safety committee had declared the wagons and mini cars were unsafe for children, unless they were to wear helmets.
I was so irritated!
Helmets-for a 30 second ride, in a specialty hospital, pulled by a registered OR nurse, toward a room filled with medical doctors?
THIS IS INSANITY.
One of the doctors confirmed that she felt it was also insane, considering how many kids gleefully toot around the hospital corridors on their IV poles. It is a small, tiny measure of fun and freedom in an otherwise challenging and dreary day.
But seriously-helmets for the ride from a parents arms to the OR?
And this-in a nutshell is the kind of asinine, blowhard and bureaucratic mentality that people have to fight every single day. These overprotective insane idiots are trying to take the fun out of everything and the risks are usually all in their little pea sized brains.
I am tired and so very bored of the Legions of Helmet Heads.
I am tired of legislation being forced upon us every time there is a tragedy (in many cases, the result of bad human judgement and not just bad luck).
I vow to continue to push against it every time it encroaches on my life.
Without some degree of risk (not stupidity and a wanton disregard for danger), there can be no real life.
With no guts-there is no glory.
Life, my friends, is not a dress rehearsal.
