The news

Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh,

There seem to be so many articles in the news lately about cases of child abuse and negligence and everything in between...

A man put a baby in the freezer, because it had a fever? And then he blamed it on the fact that he had no real parenting skills? Duh. Didn´t need to tell me that.

A woman put her baby in the microwave and ended up killing the poor thing. I think it was a month old.

In Germany, a baby was found in a freezer last week and in the last month there have been at least three child deaths due to parent negligence and abuse (this is me watching the news in Germany: "How can that *corpulent* woman STARVE HER CHILD TO DEATH!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! They obviously had more than enough food in the fridge for her and her boyfriend!".

There is something wrong with that. I mean, really. I can get pretty mad at my daughter. She is teething the last of her first four molars and cries more in the night now than she has in probably more than a year. All that crying and the effort that it takes to get her to finally fall asleep...it can get me really riled...and there have even been times in the past when I had to leave the room in order to stop myself from slapping her...but I haven´t slapped her. Because it´s not okay.

I have learned something, though.

My daughter is perfect.

She cries all the time these days. She takes all of the onions and potatoes out of their bins and leaves their peels all over the apartment. She dumps her apple juice on the couch. She slaps me in the head sometimes...oh and those head butts...she rips up any piece of paper she can get her hands on...put a writing utensil in her hand and she scribbles on everything including the walls. She never lets me sit at the computer on a chair--unless she´s up there with me...she dumps her toys all over the floor a dozen times in one day...not to mention the weeks I have lived through diarhea, fever, and teething.

But she has never done anything malicious--ever. She is not even 16 months old...she doesn´t even understand right and wrong...that will probably come some time after she *really* understands that no means no! and she is just not there yet, hehe.

Fi aman Allah,

Katherine