by Cheryl Mathis on May 22nd, 2008
I’ve been a stay-at-home mom since last September, just before my daughter was born and joined my son in our wild and crazy household. For most of my life, I wanted to be a SAHM. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” “A mommy.”
For the first year and a half of my son’s life, I worked, and we sent Ben to daycare. We picked one that had flexible hours, decent rates and came recommended by a friend. We loved the teachers, and our son seemed comfortable there.
When I was expecting our second child, we decided that I would quit my job as a proofreader and stay home with our kids. It would cost nearly 90 percent of my income to have two children in daycare, and that didn’t make sense for our family. But five months before I was scheduled to leave, we had to break up with our daycare.
The policies were changing at the center, and our son would have been negatively affected. There also seemed to be an overlay of total chaos as they transitioned to the new policies, and we weren’t comfortable with the atmosphere. Luckily, we quickly found a home-based daycare that would take our son for the summer until I resigned. We were very happy there, thank goodness.
The crap kept hitting the fan at the old center though, as employee paychecks bounced and parents pulled their kids out left and right. What really startled me was when I heard that near the end of the owner’s tenure there, the children weren’t being fed anymore. They’d go home starving. No notice to the parents that they should bring bag lunches. Nothing.
Some wonderful people we know bought the center and totally turned it around. They insisted that all the teachers be accredited, they cleaned the facility from top to bottom, and they welcomed a new era of loving, responsible childcare.
I was horrified when I heard how bad it had gotten. I don’t understand how something like that could have happened. The majority of families were low income, so maybe they felt they didn’t have a voice or a choice in what was going on. That’s just plain wrong. Even if the state is subsidizing your childcare, you still have a voice.
If I had known what was going on there when it was happening, you can be dang sure I would have stood up for those families and filed the complaints and raised such a ruckus that the situation would have remedied somehow. I hope there are other people like me in the community who wouldn’t have just looked away.
We are also fortunate to have the Child Care Connection here in the area that compiles lists of available childcare for local families. It’s free of charge, and I hope that in the future, families who find that their daycares are falling short will take advantage of the other options.
by Cheryl Mathis on May 9th, 2008
Greetings Citizens of Wausau!
I think we’re far too stagnant of a community. For such a city full of so many warm and vibrant personalities, it’s a shame that we wait until summer concerts to get outside and feel vital and connected to each other. It’s also a shame that so many of us are overweight and out of shape and seem unwilling to make basic changes in our lives to rid ourselves of the old, harmful patterns.
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by Citizen Wausau on March 10th, 2008
[This post comes to us from one of our newest bloggers, Alex. While he is new, he is surely becoming one of our most prolific. This post highlights young love, and we think it is a good tale. We hope you enjoy it.]
March 6th, 2008
I was talking with a virtual friend today. Virtual in that I know virtually nothing about this person, yet for some odd reason have absolutely no problem telling them anything. Anyway, after the conversation was over, I felt compelled to write something about my first. No, not that first, but close. It’s my first love, that rara avis, the girl that started the proverbial ball rolling.
I won’t mention any names. You know who you are. Name dropping would just be wrong and uncomfortable, or for that matter just downright wierd (yes, I know this is spelled wrong, there is a method to my madness dear broccoli lovers). So names aside, let me say she was one unique little gal.
I was a sophomore in high school, and she was a senior. Need I say more? For a young man of sixteen, this is equivalent to floppin’ a royal flush … twice in a row. Fittingly, she was blonde, and had what was a smoking car at the time. It was one of those really weird Subaru’s they came out with in the late eighties, when Subaru decided to morph their all wheel drives with some kind of futuristic sports car looking thing. Regardless, I pretty much thought it was perhaps the coolest object on the entire planet. Now I know this all sounds shallow at this point, but hey I was sixteen. I will make up for it in the near future.
Firstly, to bring everyone back to earth while shedding a little perspective, this story doesn’t take place on the football field, or during the prom, but rather in that pit of popularity known as the high school band room. At this time anyway, there hadn’t been an avalanche of girls showing interest in me and I’m not sure that this one really did either, but I assure you I was going to give it a Boy Scout try despite the consequences.
The whole “how we met” part gets a little muddled at this point, and in general my memory is fair to middling at best. But, in the grand scheme of things I suppose it really doesn’t matter. What do matter are the lessons she taught me, starting with the most important one. Look for a girl with brains.
Don’t take that the wrong way; she was a great looking girl. Outside of that, she was extremely intelligent, unusually witty, and equally creative. We used to spend inordinate amounts of time sitting in her basement watching Monty Python and listening to the Nylons. To this day I cannot listen to a Nylons song without starting to tear up.
New found emotions like these are quite powerful, and they made lasting impressions on me long after we had parted ways. I received my first love letter from the aforementioned female. I kept it for probably ten years or so, until I lost track of it. It was the kind of letter that really tugged at a young man’s heart strings. She told me, “when I saw you my day brightened like a thousand suns had spawned from one.” To this date, that is one of the most romantic things anyone has ever said to me. Coincidentally, I then proceeded to parlay that line into many a one night stand, and possibly (gasp) may have even used it to rope in the current and permanent love of my life. Once again, I say thank you.
So, if you’re out there, three cheers for all of the above. I hold those memories in the highest regard, and truly value that brief moment in time we got to share. You were instrumental in forming my belief in romance. You were my first love and my first heartbreak. Sorry about that whole puppy thing.
by Dino Corvino on February 21st, 2008
So again, it is left up to me. Sigh. Here I sit, wondering about some stuff, but not really thinking about it too much, after all I am getting a new tattoo today. So that is nice, but often I am left to wonder…
- What do you think Sidney Poitier thinks everytime he see Eddie Murphy in that fat woman suit? Does race and the discussion of race matter in Wausau? Are the Hmong people (and that is an umbrella term I suppose in Wausau) the primary form of diversity?
- I have heard of this band Freedown, and was wondering if anyone has ever seen them live?
- I was always wondering about boathouses. On our lake up north a house has a boathouse; what is in there aside from boats? What about the winter?
- Where are the outdoor ice rinks in Wausau?
- Have you noticed an increase in CW-related stuff? Our hits are through the roof, and thank you for it. We would like some new contributions from strangers though, no one wants me blathering on about boats.
- How central to your life is your computer? Do you do your accounting on it? Your calendar? Do you use your cellphone as a data device for the World Wide Web?
- Is there a differance between Shopko and Target? When I was a boy Shopko was there, so it has been here a lot longer, and as a result I wonder if I hold it in less esteem?
- Who was your best friend in grade school? Are you still best friends? Mine was Sean Palecek. The smartest kid ever. I wish I had stayed his friend. I miss Sean. He took me to Telemark once. I was allergic to the horses. We stayed in some insurance people’s joint. It was awesome. They had a tunnel, and a pool. Who is your best friend now? Do you think that we as adults (not using that to describe me of course) have them?
- What was your favorite vacation? One that you actually went on. Why? What vacation do you miss going on?
- What girl do you wish you kissed growing up? I have two. Kristin McCandless, the tennis icon of DC Everest. And TR Ambord. TR and I worked at the Rothschild Pool together. I guess I totally missed that she was really pretty and cool, all the time trying to learn to do a gainer off the high dive.
- Did you own Guess jeans? I never did. I have some cool Bugle Boy ones, and never had parachute pants.
- What is really wrong with Wausau? Anything? Are we all just complaining because we don’t have World of Warcraft guilds to join? And what about the crime thing; what is that about?
- Prior to Pearl Harbor, were we in the war in Europe, or had we stayed out of that as well? How did we get troops to Europe or the Pacific? Boats? How did they protect those troops or did countries just agree upon not killing trooper carrying ships?
- Have you ever bailed anyone out of jail?
- Do you have a secret life? I mean something that you do that like your work friends don’t know about? Not like something your ashamed of, but do you think that you are one person at work, and someone else at home?
Thats it for today.
