Sunday Morning Blogging

It’s a toss-up between blogging about how a year ago today we came home from Europe, leaving behind the perfect London spring day, after months of late winter gloom, and blogging about how close I came to hitting E yesterday. I think leaving Europe would be pretty banal: gosh we had a great time in Europe and it was sad to come home. Whereas almost hitting your kid, that opens up more possibilities.

We got in the car after a lovely Mexican food and ice cream girls night out with our neighbors (who are also just about our favorite people to hang out with in Red State, not to mention anywhere). I strapped E into her booster seat and started to drive away.

“Mom! E put her strap behind her back!” crowed her happily tattling big sister.

Usually I come down as hard on tattling as I do on just about any behavior being tattled upon, but safety trumps all in my parenting practice. I stopped the car, got out, fixed E’s strap, pulled it as tight as it could get across her belly, got back into the front seat, and started to drive away again.

“Look, Mommy! I undid my strap!” crowed the gleeful miscreant herself.

I stopped the car again, got out again, grabbed her hand hard, hard enough to hurt her, and yelled. This is where I might have hit her. I really wanted to, because I wanted to impress upon her how absolutely wrong it was, and scare her so much that she would never do it again. We were going 5 miles per hour on a side street, so really she wasn’t in danger, but all I could think of was her undoing her seatbelt on the freeway where there would be nothing I could do about it. I held her hands tight, and I yelled in my loudest and meanest voice that what she had done was not safe and she could never do it again, did she hear me?! She squirmed a little and said I was hurting her hand. I said I knew I was hurting her hand. I told her if she undid her strap again, she was going straight to her room when we got home and I wasn’t going to give her a snack or read to her at bedtime. Then she asked for Teddy who was in my bag in the front seat. I told her she could only have Teddy if she promised never to undo her strap again. She whimpered and promised. I redid her strap, got back into the front seat, gave her Teddy, and drove home. She didn’t undo her strap.