Queen of Rambles

The other day I picked up an odd picture book from the library, When the Silliest Cat was Small by Gilles Blachet. It may very well be the strangest book I’ve read, excepting the naked Swedish book. It looked intriguing. The cover features a mother elephant and a regular baby elephant, plus two baby elephants with cat coloring. I thought it could be fun and entertaining, but it was just bizarre.

So this whole book is about the baby elephant being thought of as a cat, acting like a cat, being treated like a cat. Could have been very funny. But it wasn’t. The words didn’t rhyme or flow or even make much sense (it was translated from French). The humor was much to dry for a four year old to understand. Hell, it was too dry for a 35 year old to understand. As we read each page and talked about the cat getting a drink or whatever, Erik would wrinkle up his nose and say “but that’s an elephant.”

Maybe it was supposed to be subtle. I don’t know. It was just way too strange for the Possum family. I blame the French.

The other weird thing was a playground incident.

I was sitting on the bench supervising Erik and trying not to supervise the hooligans, though it is hard to say nothing when they are about to run in front of a car. As much as I’d like to absolve myself of all responsibility, I don’t think seeing a child hit by a car would do much for my psyche.

While we were sitting there, an 18 month old came toddling over. He was visiting his grandma and she was out with him, muttering to herself that “they” don’t leave their kids unsupervised and she wasn’t going to leave him alone. I avoided all eye contact because it seemed pretty obvious that she wanted me to say “no problem! I’ll watch him!” Not going to happen. He doesn’t even know me. The few times he’s been out with his mom, she’s had a shit fit if he got so much of a speck of dirt on him. I have my hands full enough making sure Erik doesn’t run out in front of a car*. I don’t need to be distracted with a toddler I don’t even know.

Her husband/boyfriend/brother/manfriend/whoever kept yelling at her to go in the house and she kept yelling back that she needed someone to watch the kid. She also kept saying that she needed to go to the bathroom.

The toddler picked up one of Erik’s beach toys and Erik was mad that the kid didn’t ask to play with it first. I told him “He’s just a baby. It’s ok. He can play with it.”

The grandmother JUMPED on this and acted like she thought I was talking to her, offering to babysit the kid. “Oh! You’ll supervise him!”

I was so proud of myself. I said “Oh no, I’m just supervising my own son. He was asking why the baby took his shovel.”

I was given a look of death (because everyone wants someone they don’t even know to supervise their kid in middle of the street, right?) but she finally picked him up and took him in.

At least she didn’t just leave him with me.

*Our street is a dead end. The houses on one side all have driveways, but the houses on the other side just have assigned parking spaces. Basically the “street” is more like a parking lot. The playground is toward the end, but there are still enough cars ripping through that it makes me nervous.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 26th, 2009 at 11:05 am 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.