Courtesy in diapers

It is a beautiful day in Eastern Idaho! It's a little breezy, but that is something we expect and notice when we don't feel it more than when we do. I had an errand to run this morning and decided to take advantage of having everyone dressed and out the door on such a great day.

We hit a couple of places, grabbed some burgers at Burger King and drove to a park. The temperature was near perfect! As we drove into the parking lot, Joseph expressed some concern over the amount of cars and people there. I think we have passed on our dislike of crowds to our children...at least to Joseph. (When I took him to the dealership last week to get the snow tires off the van, he voiced a strong opinion about the crowd that seemed to be there. I had to let him know that most of the cars in the parking lot were for sale and it didn't mean that there was a lot of people inside.)

One of my biggest kinds of crowds I try to avoid is the kind geared to kids. We have not attended the community Easter Egg hunts for 2 or 3 years because it means there will be a lot kids. Specifically, there will be a lot of kids misbehaving while their parents are happy to ignore it all. I also don't go anywhere that is offering free food. Why are people so rude when free food is the focus? I don't mean to say that I don't like to celebrate, I just don't like watching my kids get taken advantage of while they mind their manners.

So today, when we pulled into the parking lot and Joseph said something about the number of people there, I assured him that it wasn't too many people. We found a nice spot for our blanket and enjoyed our lunch. As we were cleaning up, we enjoyed the show a 3-year-old boy gave us as he dropped his drawers and relieved himself right then and there. Joseph was quite shocked and we laughed about it. I don't think that little boy's mommy ever knew a thing. I was thankful that Joseph was shocked...I hope that means he won't try it himself sometime!

Inevitably, if we are at a park, we are going to run into rude kids. I'm sure that my own kids have been rude, too. But they don't get off easy if I hear about it or witness it myself.

Today, I was standing with Sarah as we waited for Joseph to climb a "contraption" in front of us. Just as Sarah was starting to climb up after him, a couple of little girls crowded her out and she retreated. The girls were young...probably around Sarah's age or a bit older. They were taller, but didn't speak as well, so it was hard to tell. I wasn't so irritated at their behavior as much as I was with the woman that was there with them. (I think it was a grandma.) She said sorry "if they got in the way" to me, but didn't stop anything.

I was thinking, "Lady, you ARE going to be sorry if you don't start teaching these kids from the moment they act." NONE of my kids would have ever done that in that situation. Sometimes I want to tell my kids to go ahead and push back just so they won't keep getting the short end of things. But I know it's a better lesson for them to know how it feels to be trampled a bit, if it will give them perspective on how others feel to be mistreated.

There were a couple of other times I spoke up when a few different kids needed correction but had no one around that seemed to belong to them. It's almost comical to see the look on kids' faces when someone intervenes in their fun. But really, it's bad form to take time to take off your socks and shoes in preparation to go UP the slide when there is a line waiting to come DOWN. And it's never good to hurry up the line by pushing the kids before you...especially at the top of a slide.

I guess that was a long disclosure about one of my pet peeves. An unrelated pet peeve is news/weathercasters repeatedly using a favorite word or phrase. (I was just listening to a news broadcast.) You really shouldn't use the word "now" to start your sentence unless you are referring to an actual moment in time. It really starts to seem redundant after the 3rd time in one show.