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Jinjer 36: Post-millennial Pregnancy


samurai_sarah

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10 minutes ago, PennySycamore said:

@pook,  not @nst, but I think she meant Mary Tyler Moore was old and not Erin Moran (Joanie from Happy Days. ) I was saddened by all three.  Mary Tyler Moore may have been in her 80s, but that doesn't make her death not something to be sad about.  I grew up watching Mary Tyler Moore on TV, first in The Dick Van Dyke Show and the on  her eponymous show.  "Who can turn the world on with her smile?"  2017 began with Mary's passing and ended with Rose Marie's death.  I don't care if these women weren't spring chickens; the world is poorer for having lost those two.

i agree about MTM - just I literally grew up watching Happy days and her death was shocking because it felt like my childhood was over for sure.  just shocking more I guess because of social media how scott baio lambasted her after her death before knowing the true reason she died and then feeling bad about it.  

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I don’t ever remember not having a VCR, or a microwave, and couldn’t tell you when we got an answering machine, but I think I pinned down my first newsworthy memory. 

January 21, 1987, was a snow day in south central PA. Budd Dwyer called a press conference to declare his innocence on bribery charges that he was due to be (I think) sentenced on the next day. With the cameras rolling, he then put a gun in his mouth and killed himself. Our local (Harrisburg) tv channel ran the uncut footage without a disclaimer, and got a lot of flak for it because kids were home from school that day. My mother, for one, was furious. 

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44 minutes ago, Lillymuffin said:

I don’t ever remember not having a VCR, or a microwave, and couldn’t tell you when we got an answering machine, but I think I pinned down my first newsworthy memory. 

January 21, 1987, was a snow day in south central PA. Budd Dwyer called a press conference to declare his innocence on bribery charges that he was due to be (I think) sentenced on the next day. With the cameras rolling, he then put a gun in his mouth and killed himself. Our local (Harrisburg) tv channel ran the uncut footage without a disclaimer, and got a lot of flak for it because kids were home from school that day. My mother, for one, was furious. 

It turned out later that he was innocent and had been framed. Such a sad situation. :(

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Man, it's so weird to think 9/11 will be 17 years ago this September! I was 14 and starting my first year in public school. I very much remember that day. I had been homeschooled to 8th grade, and then my parents put me in public school for 9th grade (my Mom told me later it was to help me get out of my box and be less shy - academically I was way ahead on most subjects). So I always felt a bit like an outsider around the girls my age, as I was more mature than them and just didn't care about most things they were always talking about. 

On 9/11, I remember first period was a cooking class, and we had been listening to the radio and then the teacher switched it off. She said that the teacher in the next classroom complained that it was too loud, but really she didn't want us to hear anything about what was happening. So I was completely blindsided when I walked into my civics class the next period and saw the tv on showing a skyscraper with smoke billowing out of it. I was super pissed at the cooking teacher, because she should have said something to us - we were all high school students! I thought that was really a cop-out and her not wanting to deal with something scary that we were going to hear about anyways. I didn't like being in the dark about it for a whole hour.
I don't think the teachers were supposed to have their tvs on, but the rest of the day, every single class I was in had the tv on, so I watched the news and took notes. I think my civics teacher said we'd get extra credit or something, if we kept notes about what was happening (at that point only one plane had hit, so none of us thought it was intentional, that it was an accident of some kind). I'm pretty sure we saw the second plane hit live. I remember the reporter screaming and the camera shaking because they were running away. I don't know what happened to that notebook I wrote in for the following month, but I really wish I could look through it now. 

The things that stick out the most to me that day was I borrowed a quarter to use a payphone to call my house at lunch to see if my Mom knew what was going on (she did and was watching the news too).

Seeing the camera zooming in to windows at the top of the two towers and seeing people leaning out and waving for help. And then flailing specks tumbling down and being lost in the smoke, and the news people choking out that people were jumping from the building. And then realizing all those specks I was seeing were people. That is the image that sticks in my head the most - not the towers, but those people jumping.

And a girl in my grade was really upset halfway through the day, crying and worried that our school was going to get attacked. I remember telling her, "Our school is really small and only one story - it would look like a warehouse or just an officey type building from the air, we don't have to worry about the school getting hit."
But I knew (but didn't say) that downtown Minneapolis (biggest city in Minnesota) was less than 15 minutes away anyways and would be a bigger target. They evacuated all the skyscrapers downtown in Minneapolis and St. Paul and the Mall of America (I think the mall was closed for a couple days, since it's a huge tourist attraction and at the time was largest mall in the USA. It has the word "America" in it the name, officials were worried that it would be attacked as a symbol of retail in  the US).

Our school wasn't let out early, mainly because a big contingent of students had both parents working or single parents, so the school didn't want to send them home to empty houses in the middle of the day. 

And the sky was incredibly blue and clear that day - I think somehow most of the United States had skies like that on that day. Which is unusual, because the US is HUGE and usually can have quite differing weather from coast to coast.  

I don't think I realized how much things were going to change, but I immediately thought it was equivalent to Pearl Harbor for my generation. I remember Al Qaeda being talked about on the news in the days and weeks following and none of the news programs spelled it the same way at first. I do remember feeling this sorrow that seemed to radiate from everyone after that. I do remember my church thinking that this national tragedy was going to turn so many people to God, and that we shouldn't waste this chance to save a bunch of people. 

My older brother had signed up to join the Army in 10th grade and had just graduated from high school earlier that year. He was still waiting to go to basic training when 9/11 happened. Man, did joining the military suddenly change - before 9/11 it was advertised as a way to gain good skills to use later to get better jobs and to get credit to go to college. You didn't join expecting to be sent to a war zone. Afterwards, it was much more about being patriotic and going to war. My brother ended up being deployed 5 times (maybe 6? can't keep track) to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even his deployments to Iraq were drastically different - the first time he was there in 2002 or 2003, and communication was incredibly limited. He would occasionally call on satellite phone and all calls were being monitored, because they thought Al Qaeda was more technologically advanced and could possibly listen in. If my brother said something that the intelligence listener didn't like or thought he was giving too much detail, the call would be cut off immediately. The last time he was there in 2009, I think it was, he was super bored and constantly buying stuff online and shipping it home and could call us whenever he wanted to. 

Sorry this got so long - you guys really brought me back to a season of my life I haven't thought about for awhile. I'm 31 now and have been married for 5 years - I am so different from that 14 year old now, it feels like looking at a stranger's life.

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I'm on the West Coast so when the twin towers fell I wasn't up/dressed/ tv on yet.  I had a 4 year old and was pregnant with my 2nd and turned the tv on briefly, probably was planning to pop a video in for my daughter before preschool.  I remember the first thing I saw was actually the pentagon and I called my husband in from another room before the coverage switched back to New York and the towers.  The 4th flight path I think was EWR-SFO (the one that crashed in PA) and my hubby was actually scheduled to be on that flight several days later so it hit a little close to home.  Of course his trip outbound got cancelled since all flights were grounded for days.  I had to walk the line then between wanting to wallow in tv coverage and wanting to protect my daughter from it.  

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12 hours ago, tabitha2 said:

Anyone remember fighting your siblings over these?  Those were the days my friends...

 

98110a56cf4229cfe000be85e3a2f9b3.jpg

What is that thing?

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Born in 59. I remember JFK's funeral on our black and white tv, Bobby Kennedy and MLKs deaths, and the moon landing, as well as riots, and Kent State. I was on a portage on a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters when Nixon resigned...teaching when the Challenger exploded, with the whole school watching in the gym...one of our teachers had been a finalist. And, of course, driving to work on that painfully beautiful morning of Monday, Sept. 11. My husband was flying as a commercial pilot then, with a flight scheduled, but they had not taken off. My brother in law, also a pilot out of San Francisco, was grounded in Chicago, so he stayed with us for a week.

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27 minutes ago, freedom_for_all said:

What is that thing?

Looks like the cable company-provided channel-selector for a TV.

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Funny anecdote related to things you remember from your childhood: My 8 year old told me last night that he remembers me buying my mini van when he was 2.5 years old.  I told him I didn’t think he actually remembers that and he told me he remembers it because car racing was on the TV in the dealership and he was watching that while I was talking to the salesmen.  I have no idea if car racing was really on, but I guess I’ll take his word for it.

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It really is funny the things you remember. We moved when I was two and a half so I have no memories of the first house I lived in...except for the Christmas tree. I can vividly picture it in the front room in the window. My mom has no idea how I remember it, but she said it was placed exactly where I remember it. 

As for newsworthy events, I remember being in my second year of college, in placement on the morning of 9/11. I live in Canada, but I was doing placement in a childcare in a pretty prominent government building. Everyone in the building was worried about a possible attack, but I remember thinking they were crazy to think that we would be under attack in a small-ish city pretty far from the US border. The supervisor of the centre kept coming in to give us updates as we didn’t have a radio in the room. I remember going home on my lunch and going online to find out more info, because our cable TV hadn't been hooked up yet. But I was also on super slow dial up so I didn’t get much information until later that night. 

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I worked in the financial services industry on 9/11, and as well as the shock of what happened, I remember the mad scramble of trying to get all of our trades settled before the markets closed.  I also remember seeing GWB on television saying something around them having jets in the air as soon as the first tower was hit, and thinking that they must have had some prior knowledge of an attack being imminent, because why would you think this was anything but an accident at first? Like a lot of other people, I was watching it unfold on televsion and saw the second plane hit.

I also remember where I was when I heard Princess Diana died, that was a huge shock.

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my earliest memories include nixon resigning and the moon landing, but i really only have bits and scraps of memories of everything in my life. i do have pretty clear memories of 9/11 though. i was at my youngest son's middle school to volunteer in the school store that day, when i came into the office to get the keys the news was on about the first plane. i did my work and by the time i came back the second plane had hit. i immediately got my son and raced home to my disabled mother, who hadn't heard. called my husband to get my daughter from her high school, while i got my older son from his. there was no way my kids were coming home on public transportation that day! when the third plane hit the pentagon and the one here in PA too,  i just knew they were coming for philadelphia. we are not too far from a naval supply center and i really thought it would be bombed. i went back and forth between my aol community where a number of people were in nyc and the tv...for days. the most eerie part of the whole time was the silent skies, but when i heard a plane i really felt panicked, i still panic a bit when i see a plane that looks too low.

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On 9/11 we were up getting the kids ready for school and didn't have the TV on because then the kids would want to watch that and my husband and I both had jobs we couldn't be late for.  I heard the phone ring and then my husband called out "A plane has hit one of the Twin Towers!  It's all over the news!"  So we turned the TV on and tried to watch while continuing to get the kids ready.  When the second plane hit, it had already happened but we didn't realize that and thought we were watching it live.  Then the news came that it was terrorists and more planes had been hijacked.  We got the kids off and went to work.  I was sure we'd be swamped because I worked for tech support for Excite cable internet and I thought people would be watching on their computers all day.  It was dead, people were huddling around TV's and listening to the radio.  My husband said that it was unusually quiet where he worked as they had a radio on and no one wanted to miss any new news.

When I got home, our youngest and the girl we semi fostered got home from grade school.  They didn't really understand what the big deal was, because once they were told that the planes crashed way far away from us and we had nothing to fear, they got bored with it all.  Mostly they watched movies all day while the teachers kept going out into the hallways to talk quietly and catch each other up on the latest news.  Some had radios that they were covertly listening to during class, others found excuses to go to the office so they could duck into the teachers lounge and watch the TV.

When my oldest two got home, the one in high school said it was all that was talked about in class, and most classrooms had a TV on.  The students were told to either find a quiet activity or watch the TV.  Some of the teachers tried to talk about what was happening, but it was too raw to really understand.  One teacher had to leave because her sister was supposed to be on one of the planes, but it turned out that the sister had switched to a different flight and couldn't let anyone know for a while because the phones were overloaded and she couldn't get through.

The junior high student had more of a combination of watching movies and watching TV.  Some of the teachers didn't want to let the kids have any information and others thought they should know.  Both of the older kids reported upset teachers and some crying students.  We live near an air base and word got around that maybe we could be a target.

The skies were incredibly blue that day, and to look up and see no con trails was strange.  For three days the skies were aircraft free except for military flights.

That leads me to point out something unexpected that came from 9/11.  Climatologists were able to prove the effect all those con trails have on Earth's temperature.  When all commercial air traffic was suspended, the days were warmer and the nights colder by just over 2 degrees.  Pretty conclusive evidence that humans are indeed affecting climate change, TRUMP.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/contrail-effect.html

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2 hours ago, SamiKatz said:

I also remember seeing GWB on television saying something around them having jets in the air as soon as the first tower was hit, and thinking that they must have had some prior knowledge of an attack being imminent, because why would you think this was anything but an accident at first? 

Because air traffic control knew that the plane had been hijacked even before it hit the building. There’s at least one really good documentary on the subject, which I think is available on YouTube, and you can listen to their actual communications. They did in fact scramble jets to try to intercept the plane, but they were too late - and like most people at the time, they assumed at first that the hijackers were planning to land the plane somewhere.

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The 1st Olympic moment I remember was the 1980 US Hockey team beating Russia.  I THINK the game was played on a Sunday because they actually did a really short mass and canceled one so everyone could watch.  They had a viewing party in the church hall. We went to friends house.  I remember thinking what a big deal it was because the Russians were so evil.  But that is all I remember from that one, I was only 9 so.

Now the 1984 Olympics in LA. Mary Lou Retton(SP?) and the gymnastics team. 

1989 David Hasselhoff singing on the Berlin wall as it came down. 

1992 with Tania and Nancy & the crying Russian skater that stole Nancy's gold medal.  :lol:

1993 the 1st World Trade Center bombing, The Waco wackos & Ruby Ridge

1995 OKC bombing and OJ

Shit, a lot happened in the 1990's.

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3 hours ago, Jenn The Heathen said:

Funny anecdote related to things you remember from your childhood: My 8 year old told me last night that he remembers me buying my mini van when he was 2.5 years old.  I told him I didn’t think he actually remembers that and he told me he remembers it because car racing was on the TV in the dealership and he was watching that while I was talking to the salesmen.  I have no idea if car racing was really on, but I guess I’ll take his word for it.

He might! I'm about 20, and I vividly remember eating peas at the kitchen table while it was snowing outside when I was 2.5 (I remember remembering this as a 4 year old too).

I also remember my first time at build-a-bear when I was three. I got a pink bear and named it Hellica because I thought the character Helga from Hey Arnold was called Hellica

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My earliest memory is from the Summer of 69 (no lie). We were traveling to the East Coast, visiting friends and family. 

I have three specific memories:

1. Hotel in Knoxville, TN - the hotel provided a roll-away crib for me, and it was too short, so it hurt the top of my head. I remember the pain and my mom "rescuing" me from it.

2. Friends' house in Maryland - they had stairs! I remember bumping down them on my butt.

3. Family's house in Connecticut - they also had stairs! My little cousin was following me up them, and he fell down them. I got the blame. lol

I was born in 1966, so these memories are from 2.5 years of age.

DH remembers being fed in his high chair at 11 months. It was peas.

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I remember a lot of things from the age of 2 and possibly one or two things from just before age 2. I thought everyone did until I read an internet thread where people were talking about their earliest memories, and a lot of them couldn't remember anything before the age of 4 or 5 and couldn't believe anyone else could. I'm not sure what causes some people to remember further back than others. None of my memories are particularly exciting or traumatic, so I really don't know.

That, and peeing in the shower. It seems like whenever one of those 'habits other people think are weird' threads pops up, all these people talk about peeing in the shower, and they refuse to believe that everyone doesn't pee in the shower - anyone who says they don't must be lying. I literally never heard of or even fathomed peeing in the shower until my late 20s when I came across one of these conversations. WHY WOULD YOU PEE IN THE SHOWER? Is this mostly a male thing? Have I been unwittingly standing in the residue of other people's urine when I take showers in places that aren't my own home? I know the water washes it away, BUT STILL. (And yes, I have no problem using public toilets, but somehow find the idea of standing in a shower that someone peed in terrible. I fully accept that this is somewhat irrational. :pb_lol:)

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@singsingsing I totally understand the idea behind using public toilets but being grossed out by peeing in the shower. When you use a toilet you are not touching a surface that touched pee. Unless people are gross and peed on the seat. My husband was surprised that I was grossed out when he says he pees in the shower. So it must be a guy thing. 

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I had a friend who insisted she remembered her first birthday.  "The cake was pink and blue and white, and I got frosting in my eyelashes."

Her mother said that she got the description of the cake right, probably because she'd seen pictures of her first birthday, but when they brought the cake to her with a lit candle on top, she screamed and almost knocked her highchair over trying to get away.  She wouldn't go near a birthday cake again until her third birthday when her parents presented a cake with no candles.  "But you did get frosting in your eyelashes.  While your father and I were arguing over the camera, your brother pushed your head into the cake."  

My friend has always hated cake.  Go ahead and buy her one for her birthday, she'd make a wish and blow out the candle, but she'd never eat it.  She'd take a scoop of ice cream instead.

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One of my earliest memories is from when I was about 3. I was sitting in the kitchen, which looked out into our backyard. I looked out the window and saw three little kids I didn't know playing on our swing set - and my mum told me they were triplets!

Later on as an adult I figured this must be a false memory. Like maybe I did see kids out there, but they weren't really triplets. Or I was confusing it with a cartoon, or something. So I asked my mum about it. "Hey, do you remember triplets being in our backyard, playing on the swing set?" I was actually surprised when she said, "Yes, they were [next door neighbour]'s nieces. They were triplets."

That said, I also have a very early memory of my grandma running me over with a shopping cart, which I can say with 99% certainty did not really happen. :pb_lol:

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One of my earliest memories is my brother flipping over a shopping cart while I was sitting in it. I was 2 and he was 4. He broke his nose but I was fine. Food was everywhere. My poor mother.

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Aside from 9/11. my earliest memory was when I was 4 and walked into a wasps nest. 

My father was babysitting, and he never did have a good track record with that. My older sister lost her toes on his first babysitting experience. 

After the wasp nest thing, he never babysat again. 

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I grew up in an abusive household so my earliest memories are traumatic.  I’ll spare you the details, but I think I can remember back when I was 3.5.

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