Queen of Rambles

Don’t you love how I usually hype something up, then totally forget it the next day so I never fulfill my writing karma? That isn’t going to happen tonight. I promised a tale of mama drama and a tale of mama drama is what you’ll get.

We have this indoor playgroundish sort of place called Little Sprouts. My mom group friends always talk about it, but at $10/session I’ve never really cared to find out if it was the cat’s meow or not. They are currently running a half off campaign, which meant we got to go check it out for $5. My conclusion? Totally worth the $5. Not at all worth $10. It’s a small retail space next to a Safeway that has all kinds of toys that you see in normal children’s catalogs, not speciality pre-school catalogs. There are about 10 different ride on toys, a slide/treehouse sort of thing, a ball pit and some other random toys scattered throughout the room. Erik had a blast playing in the ball pit, but it was kind of a pain because he loves to throw things and he had a pit full of balls. He would have had the whole pit emptied in less than 10 minutes if I would have let him. I don’t exactly want to pay money to go to a place where I constantly have to discipline my child for playing in inappropriate ways.

When we arrived there were two women sitting in the parent area, fully engrossed in their laptops. It soon became apparent that at least one of the women needed to get off her ass and get over and help her children play nicely with others. She had the brattiest five year old I’ve ever seen (and I used to be a substitute teacher). The girl took a toy away from Erik and the mom did manage to come over and tell her not to take things away from little kids, but she didn’t make the girl give the toy back. Instead, she let the girl sulk off with it and didn’t even apologize to me or Erik.

At one point the girl decided she was hungry and declared in a voice that would do an eye-rolling, know-it-all, impossible to please, 13-year-old proud that if her mom didn’t give her a snack “right this minute” she was going to “have a melt down.” Kids learn that language and manipulative behavior from somewhere. It was easy to see her mother encouraged that kind of langauge as she was instantly awarded with what she desired.

The woman also had an 18 month old daughter who received zero attention. I couldn’t even figure out who the girl belonged to for a long time because the owner of the place had to pick her up several times when she was crying so that was a little confusing.

The place has two toddler roller coasters which are totally dangerous in a room full of small children. I think the owner needs to re-think those, but that’s not the point of this little story.

The neglected little girl LOVED the roller coaster, but since she had no mother to help her, she had to figure out how to reset the cart every time all by herself. She did pretty ok most of the time, though there were a couple of times that she didn’t get both wheels on the track and I had to rescue her because she was just sort of hanging off the side, screaming, about to have the little cart topple on her. It wasn’t exactly a cliff face, but it was still not a situation I enjoyed witnessing. The mom noticed once, but was so far away she couldn’t get to her easily. I just don’t get how any mom can think it is ok to plop their 18 month old down in that environment and then go off and play with her computer. I try not to hover with Erik, but I did keep in close proximity in case he decided to hit someone, poke out a baby’s eyes, throw a train set across the room, etc.

Later, a woman with a four year old and twin 10 month olds came in. Like me, she supervised her children very well, but she had three of them so couldn’t keep her eye on them every single second. One of the twins was obsessed with the roller coaster car and would crawl over to it when the girl would come down the coaster. At one point, the twin pulled herself up and was holding onto it with her little 10 month old determination. Before anyone could do anything, the 18 month old bit the baby on the hand. The laptop mom strolled over because there was a lot of crying, but she thought her daughter had been hurt. The other mom was very proactive and told her straight up that her daughter had bit the baby even though the other mom refused to believe it at first. Once both the other mom and I had confirmed that her daughter had indeed bitten the baby, she busted out her insanity.

“She must have been trying to tell her that she needs her personal space,” was the exact line. The levels of snottiness could have filled several boxes worth of tissues.

Hello! A ten month old doesn’t know what personal space is! If her daughter is going to react poorly to other children being near her (and I know that does happen. At that age Erik was the king of “personal space” issues), she needs to be close by and ready to intervene.

The other mom didn’t pull any punches. She turned and looked at me and said “and she needs to watch her children instead of sitting over there with her computer.”

The other mom was standing less than 2 feet away.

I hate being in situations like that, but the mom needed to hear it. I kind of wanted to crawl under my chair and hide.

They got into a little verbal confrontation with the laptop mom being all new-age-pycho-babble-mamby-pampy telling us that it’s hard to watch two kids at the same time but that she was dong her best. I didn’t realize that totally ignoring your children constituted trying to be anything but the best zoned out hippy. She never yelled. She used a very controlled, practiced, fake voice. She was just dripping the “my kids are precious and I am a genius and we know best” attitude that gives modern parents a bad name. We were there two hours and saw a lot of families come and go. Her oldest daughter was the oldest child in the whole place and the only one that presented any kind of discipline problem at all (I don’t view the 18 month old biting as a discipline problem, I view it as a lack of supervision problem). I would hate to be her children’s teacher in a few years *shudder*.

I can just see her pounding away at the keyboard, blogging about the mean, mean women at Little Sprouts who don’t understand how hard she works and how wonderful her kids are.

Though the media and television portrays this woman’s parenting style as the rule rather than the exception, I’m really glad to say the mothers I know in real life are not like that at all. Sure, in my moms group we sometimes get a little bit into talking and forget to watch the children 100%, but you hardly ever see us all in a group together because someone is always drifting–or full out sprinting–off to deal with a kid. I guess I’m pretty lucky to have gotten involved with so many women who share my basic parenting beliefs. My family thinks that I raise Erik in a new-age-pycho-babble-mamby-pampy style with organic food, co-sleeping, and talking through situations while giving him time to process and make choices. They have no clue what a real mamby-pamby style looks like.

Exciting, wasn’t it!

Today was much less exciting. The weather was brisk, but sunny so we spent about 2 hours outside. Erik wasn’t interested in the park or the slide or even his ball. Instead, he discovered the delightful sound of leaves crunching underfoot. We found a thick patch of leaf debris and he spent all afternoon running, falling, jumping, and rolling through the leaves. They vacuum the leaves once a week, but there are so many trees in this complex that the little patch he was playing in was about a foot deep. I just closed my eyes and hoped that there wasn’t any doggie dookie or worse. He didn’t get stabbed by any needles or covered in crap, so I’m calling it a good day.

Other good things:
1) I got my shutterfly book done in time to cash in on a couple of different deals. I was so frustrated that I e-mailed their customer service and they actually helped. I just had to turn off my pop-up blocker. Weird, since I never had to do that before.

2) I ordered a pair of knee-high black boots from eBay and was pretty sure they wouldn’t fit and I’d have to resell them. But they fit! Perfectly! Now, what am I going to wear knee high boots with? Do I tuck my pants in them? Put them under my pants? Just wear mini-skirts and carry a whip? What?

3) This is going to be the Season of the Internet People. I have a Christmas cookie date (though that crossed the border into real life friend instead of internet friend a long time ago), a quilting date, a potential LJ play date, a freak coming to live in the area for a semester, and another freak coming for a short weekend! Whoo-hooo! That’s enough to keep a girl busy! Lots of social time, none of the angst! Anyone else want to plan a visit? We love having company. It’s the only way our house ever gets cleaned.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.