These berries were on a bush in the front yard. I was walking Taylor and saw them. I was inspired by the color because of a fantastic photo by Mark over at Green Fingered Photographer. Mark consistently has fantastic shots on his blog. He puts much time and effort into each photo that he takes too. Check out his blog today as well as every Sunday when he posts for Green Thumb Sunday.

Today on my Flatwater Tech I wrote about two cool things. The first is Thoof, it a new news site that has a really neat way to get news that is specific for you presented to you. You can watch a screencast about Thoof too. The other post on Flatwater Tech is about Blogging Den. This is a new blog that I will write for from time to time. It is a collaborative blog to help promote your own blogs. Looks like it is going to be interesting.

Today Allison sent me an article that made me furious and sickened so I will be climbing onto my dusty soap box for the remainder of this post.

*Climbing on Soap Box*

As you may have read here you know that around October Allison and I will be new parents. And maybe it is because this is on our minds but we both seem to be finding depressing stories about people who neglect and abuse their kids. It is so scary and sad to read about this cases on a daily basis as well as see stories about these cases on a daily basis on the news. So Allison sent me this article about a couple in Nevada who were “too addicted to Dungeons and Dragons” video games to feed their two children. The story is very sad and graphic so if you have a kind heart you might not want to read this. I read it and I am infuriated about cases like these. Being a parent means that you are not the focus anymore, your kids are, you have to care for these little people that you made. They are not toys to play with abuse and neglect. They are living breathing people. It makes me so angry when I read these stories and it also makes me sad.

I know that I am not a parent yet, I am a parent to be, and I will not truly know how hard it is to be a parent until I am one. I do know that I will have to stop being selfish, and I mean focused on self. Even though I am married to Allison and we may be focused on each other as a loving couple we still can get by with being a little selfish. We can afford to focus on ourselves from time to time. We are both independent people who can take care of ourselves.

Another way that we are selfish is that we have pets that make it easy to continue to be selfish, focused on self. We own cats, cats are pretty self sufficient if someone checks in on them on a daily basis. And I am not saying that cat owners are selfish people, we don’t have to do as much for our pet as we would for say, a dog, Dogs have to be walked multiple times a day and a dog can’t really be left alone for a couple of days. Dogs are more dependent on us. However with our cats, we can pick up and go somewhere for a weekend and the cats will be fine. So we have pets that, although they rely on us for food and shelter and cleaning up after them, they can be left alone. What I am saying here is that we have not had the experience of caring for something that was totally dependent on us. You can leave a cat at home when you run to the store, they may chew up your toilet paper roll or puke on the floor but generally they just sleep and lounge around the house. So having cats has not prepared us to be parents, yet we had to sign many papers saying that we would take care of them.

I know that I am selfish in some of the hobbies that I have. I have my collection of Transformers, comic books, LEGO sets, heck all that will have to stop to make sure we can properly take care of the needs of our baby. If I continued to buy these items at the expense of my child’s welfare then that is pretty selfish of me. And when I really have to stop myself from buying the latest Optimus Prime figure at Target, it is going to sink in just how selfish I have been.

Despite how good we may be as people we have no idea how focused on self we are until the child is born. But still we are a bit selfish and we will find out just how selfish we have been once we have a living breathing person dependent on us for everything.

What I am trying to say is that despite being the selfish people that we currently are I can say with certainty that I wouldn’t let my kids starve to death while I focused on my own superficial needs like entertainment from video games or blogging or collecting Transformers. I just see no logical way in which I could ever let my child suffer because I was too ‘addicted’ to video games. Stories like this make me sick in my heart.

*Climbs off Soap Box*.