We’ve served our daughter (12yo on Thursday!) coffee for God knows how long.
I’ve been on many flights and the crew always does a seat/passenger count prior to take-off. I wonder if the flight attendants did one, or if they fudged the number once they found they were 1 over?
The article never actually says the boy has a bad home life. Just that he’s weird and is always getting into trouble. So far, there’s no indication it’s because of abuse and could just be because the kid is too smart for his own good.
Yeah, that makes fuck-all sense.
Just because he’s a sociopath that’s not great at lying yet, doesn’t mean he has a ‘bad home life’ (unless you define ‘bad home life’ as having a kid who steals, lies, etc.).
I could believe that if his mother works at the airport, he might have hung out there enough that he was knew backdoors and gaps in security. Or perhaps the security people let him through the checkpoints when they shouldn’t have. Which is unfortunate, as they’ll probably make it difficult for other kids who like to hang out at airports. (If you’ve ever read Patrick Smith’s Ask the Pilot column, you might have seen his description of how he and his friends hung out at Logan Airport as children.)
Hilarious, but inaccurate.
Is this really going to happen, or is this just something people keep talking about?
It better not have been all talk or I’m going to be extremely pissed retroactively about all the construction I put up with living by the UofM last year.
Ah, very well then. When I was there, no such thing was happening, and a bunch of people in the suburbs were mad (for some reason) about the very idea. I mean really, why do people in Edina care so much? Anyway, carry on!
Kid sounds really smart and problematic. It’s impossible to tell from the details so far whether his parents are shitty and this is his reaction, or whether his parents are totally normal and just trying to cope with having a kid who does this kind of stuff. If the latter, I hope his mom doesn’t get into trouble with her job.
Agreed, sounds like he could be a smart weird kid from an otherwise normalish family.
Aside, I used to ride the bus downtown to the zoo or the main library when I was nine.
Never thought about going to the airport but I totally could have done it.
If I were working at a coffee shop, and a nine-year-old ordered a coffee, I’d assume that he was picking it up for his parents or an older sibling. Though really, a kid drinking coffee really shouldn’t be as shocking as it apparently is.
I started drinking coffee at 44.
With enough cream and sugar coffee can be quite palatable to a child. That is how I got started around 8 or 9.
Turns out the kid’s a repeat offender. Link.
Other news stories have the police department stating the memo was private, confidential, and should not have been leaked to the media.
I liked the story better when he was just a mischievous little scamp getting into all kinds of hijinks.
I’m curious: For the parents of the wee coffee-drinkers, when they would order it in a restaurant, did the wait staff serve it without comment? Without asking if it was a joke, or looking to a parent for confirmation?
I suppose it’s possible that I’m reading too much into a history of pre-teen car theft, multiple investigations, and matricidal fantasies. Let’s just say that nothing in this new information alleviates my concerns that he comes from a troubled life.
and coffee!!
Ah, gotcha. We never got tea either, and Coke was a very occasional treat, so I was thinking in those terms.
I don’t see any reason to assume either that the kid’s a budding sociopath or that he has a terrible home life. Either or both could be true, but some kids are just naturally very, very creative in the kind of trouble they get into.
Sure. They might look at me and I nod now, but when they were “wee,” I did the ordering for them.
And yes, plenty of cream and sugar - its like warm coffee ice cream the way she drinks it.
In my daughter’s case, she started drinking it because my mother would let her have sips of her mochas. But she has also been subject to migraines (probable migraines) since she was really little and caffeine was part of her pediatrician’s suggestion for dealing with it - they don’t like putting little kids on anti-migraine drugs if they can deal with headaches with a cup of coffee or a coke and some Advil- I’d prefer my kids drink coffee with cream and sugar than the carbonated caffeinated corn syrup that is Coke (that’s been available, but more limited than coffee, in our house). She didn’t become a regular “coffee in the morning” person until middle school - around 11.
She is fourteen now.
I’ve drank coffee since I was maybe 4 years old. My mum used to make it with warmed milk, instant coffee and sugar, kind of a home-made latte.
After a few years of this I graduated to normal coffee. I recall a trip to Florida when I was maybe 10 years old, and I ordered a coffee with my meal at a roadside diner in Georgia (we drove). The black waitress was astounded! Her eyes bugged out of her head and she was saying “Coffee! Y’all want coffee!” I didn’t understand at the time; coffee was just a warm drink that I enjoyed.
You know, I wonder if the coffee thing is cultural. My mother was a German American farm child - she was driving a tractor for haying at 10. Everyone in her family drank coffee. I drank coffee as a kid - not often - but it wasn’t a forbidden drink (I usually drank hers).
My husband was born in the Netherlands, and his mother doesn’t think its at all odd for us to give our children milk with coffee (which is what it really was when they were little).
I also grew up having a glass of wine with dinner (cut with 7up) from as early as I can remember on any special occasion - that was my father’s Italian side. My paternal grandfather used to make us grasshoppers as an after dinner treat.
My mother was just telling the story about one year during harvest - she was probably ten or eleven, her cousin and her decided to hit the cooler and drink some beer. They didn’t want to get caught, so they drank a little from each bottle and then topped it off with water and recapped them - which is what gave them away - had they just had a swig and recapped it, they wouldn’t have gotten caught. Get caught they did, and they got in trouble. “If you want a beer, take one, but don’t ruin every bottle in the cooler!”