Natalia: Conspiracy Theorist

Natalia is a born conspiracy theorist. I mean, who doesn't love a good conspiracy story anyway. Aliens, government cover-ups, biblical mysteries; she loves them all. The best part, all of her stories have a sliver of truth to them, so you know they are good. Jeremy and I actually Google her chronicles to figure out where in the world she comes up with this stuff. We still have no idea how the stories evolve in her brain, but there is some truth to them. Some of you may remember the "green granny smith spider" (click on it to catch up on the legend). This terrifying arachnid can take out five kids on the playground in one nasty spray. She saw a kid go down that day from it's venomous onslaught of terror. I think I found out later that kid has type I diabetes, so he probably did go down that day... but not from "Granny".

Okay, so here is the conspiracy story we got last year that I am JUST now getting around to telling y'all.

In another country there is a company that makes t-shirts and ships them to the US. It's a popular manufacturing site for making t-shirts, apparently. Well, one day when a worker was doing something involving stirring shirts in a vat of chemicals, the worker fell in! The shirts being manufactured were white, but when the worker fell into the mixer, or whatever, it stained all the shirts RED! (This is a good story, huh). The company is so corrupt that they just added more red dye to the batch, and now if you are wearing a red shirt you are probably wearing the blood of that poor worker! Shame!

Yes, I get that my daughter is the future hipster, granola, "can I tell you why dairy is bad for you?" college student of America.

So I actually re-Googled it and found it is a story from 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh. All of the articles I found talk about clothing being manufactured based on the "blood, sweat, and tears" of Indian workers. It's really sad stuff. Last year when Natalia was in fifth grade they had to find current event articles to talk about in class. I guess she skimmed. Her story is much more interesting. In Natalia's defense, after reading the article I'm pretty sure all of our t-shirts (regardless of color) have some blood mixed in them. Yikes!

Then there is the story about how you can use coconut water for a blood transfusion. What?! We had been to Mexico not too long before and enjoyed walking around the shops armed with pesos and a fresh coconut with a straw. Now I'm imagining tourists walking around with fanny packs and coconuts hanging from IV poles while they head into Senior Frogs. As a nurse I was willing to stand firm in my "know-it-allness" and shoot this down. Natalia was adamant that this was a real thing. 

Enter Google.

I guess the article came from NPR about how coconut water is similar in composition to human plasma. In Somalia, a guy's life was saved by an emergency transfusion of coconut water when nothing else was available. How they figured out to reach for a coconut is beyond me. 

Nurse: "Doctor, we are losing him!"

Doctor: "Hand me a coconut"

Nurse: .....

Doctor "Hand me a coconut, dammit, we are running out of time!"

Nurse: "Can somebody shake that tree and give the doctor a damn coconut?!"

There are also rumors that coconut water was used during the World Wars for the same reasons. So there you go. Maybe the concept of fanny packs and IV coconuts isn't too far from the future after all. 

Sometimes Natalia just hits us with random factoids. Like, we were at the zoo checking out the giraffes when she says "If a giraffe falls down it dies." We were next to a kiddo who was about five, or six who all of a sudden looked very concerned about the giraffe's welfare. Jeremy and I were all like, "Nuh, uh." and we start arguing with our child like we are all in fifth grade. So what do we do? We Google it, of course. You know what? She's right! If a giraffe falls down in the wild it can't get itself back up and will meet its demise by either starvation or predator. As in lions and such, not the extraterrestrial hunter of Arnold Schwarzenegger; although I guess that is a possibility...

There you go. Natalia 3, parents 0.

So, after a few of these immature battles with our smarty-pants tween, Jeremy and I have stopped Googling the stories. Well, sometimes Jeremy will look into, as Paul Harvey would say, "The rest of the story". Last night Natalia was sitting on my lap crying (literally) because she says she's "stupid". What?! Not even!

She is still struggling in school. Lots of "F's". She just finished being watched like a goldfish in a bowl by resource teachers to test for disabilities. The word

disability sounds off to me. Quirky learner sounds more appropriate. I told her last night that she is the best student I have ever seen. I'm not just paying mommy lip service here. It's not like "my kid is a very special kid because I made her", although I feel that way too. No. Here's why: I have never seen a student work so hard and stay motivated even when she knows her grades are going to consistently stay low. She knows there is something wrong with her processing. It's not like it is a secret. She has to work harder for her mediocre grades than anyone in her class and it's exhausting. All that, and she still loves learning. That speaks volumes about her school and teachers. It makes me so proud of her character. She is starting to figure out ON HER OWN what works for her and what causes her brain to put on the brakes. That's huge. Okay, I'm wandering away from my point, but she can totally learn and she is insanely smart. When she takes in information she really keeps it. These stories are funny because she has limited life experience to wrap them up in a realistic bow, but she understood the complexities of the stories. Gold star.

I'll try to keep y'all up to speed on her latest conspiracy theories. It's a public service really. How would you know there is a green granny smith spider threat, or that the Black Claw (another blog link) is waiting in the climbing tubes at Wings to capture your children? Should the zombie apocalypse cause a massive disaster, make sure you grab as many coconuts as you can; and if you see a fallen giraffe for heaven's sake help him up before he dies.