Small child shenanigans just get started at about 18 months
Yes, precisely. We lived with my dad for a while when our son was that age. At one point he spat up a long stemmed drawing pin. He seemed so relieved. Another time my son couldn’t contain his expression when I sat on a particular chair in the living room. I had a look underneath and found his secret stash of biscuits and toys.
Can’t say I’m exactly looking forward to the hormone-fueled stupidity that awaits us, though.
Its a blast. This January my phone rang at 3 AM. Its my 15 year old son, last seen going to bed at 9 PM. He says he has to put somebody on the phone. Its a police officer who says we can’t charge them because they were given the keys. He gives me the address and we drive around to pick him up. I couldn’t stop laughing because it could have been much worse.
Man, when mine was that age it was a quickly learned rule that little fingers will get inserted pretty much anywhere possible. In noses (not their own), under bathroom doors while you’re trying to poop in peace, etc…
I can’t even imagine leaving a powered on shredder anywhere near a toddler.
It’s actually pretty hard to get little fingers into most things, at least if they’re CE marked. I admire the patience and effort my 3yr old puts into such investigations, but there are a really very annoying set of tests you need to go through where you try to insert a “standard finger” into all the nooks and crannies of your device to prove it’s not dangerous. It shouldn’t be possible for your toddler to get his/her fingers into a shredder as far as the blade. Unless you bought a cheap knockoff on the internets - then anything could happen.
The shredder I have in this room is well protected from the top paper inserting end, but not so much on the bottom where it comes out. There I can touch all the shredding parts directly. There IS a flap that falls over them if you turn it over, but it does nothing if kept right side up.
(I only know this because I filled the receptacle too full once and everything jammed. I had to manually clear some paper from it.)
Hearing these folks say they laughed is genuinely such a balm to my soul right now.
I have a comic about abuse that still goes around. It depicts someone having a tantrum because someone else broke some small anonymous item (I imagined a teacup when I drew it) - and despite the tantrum-haver saying terrible things, people have justified it as normal, telling me that being angry in that way over any damaged item was to be expected and it was unreasonable to expect otherwise - it’s seriously a bummer, and it’s just so nice to see an example like this where adults handled their emotions without lashing out.
Feels silly to think of that as so uplifting, but after the messages I get because of that comic… yeah this is nice to think about.
Exactly. Everyone’s rushing to judge these parents for leaving a toddler unsupervised for ten seconds, when really we should be judging them on what recreational activities they choose to spend their money on.
US currency uses a unique paper that can be verified chemically and tested other ways, certain wave lengths of light for example. Its pretty cheap to check if its real currency that way. Its not air tight, but with enough certainty to mitigate losses from counterfeiting. Cashiers do it constantly all day with pens and little UV lights. I’m sure a government body that specializes in currency has better versions.
Weighing still wouldn’t neccisarily be useful though. They need to know the denominations of the individual bills. And a $100 bill weighs the exact same as a $1 bill. And they’re not going to just take some one’s word for it that this bag of shredded money is totally worth a grand. Otherwise people would just start shredding stacks of singles and sending them in claiming “Oh man I shredded my vast hoard of $100 bill’s by accident!”
The pens are a test for starch sizing. US currency paper does not have starch sizing, so the idea for the test is that real US currency paper will test negative for starch. This simplistic test led James Randi to demonstrate the unreliability of these pens by taking out high denomination bills from his bank, spray starching them, and returning them to the bank.
