Those who know me (K) know that I am prone to hating children from time to time; namely, when they give me the flu-or sick in general-, when they scream at the top of their lungs for more than 10 seconds, when they write in my books, when they are defiant in social situations because they know that they are less likely to get in trouble, and so on. I don't consider this feature of my personality to be particularly incompatible with wanting children of my own, nor do I think that feeling this way (moderately irritated, hate is certainly not the right word) will make me a bad parent in any sense of the word. Give me a few seconds of silence, a warm cookie and I get over it pretty quick.
This evening, however, I experienced a renewed animosity for children when P and I were walking around the lake with the hound. We were walking behind a couple pushing a stroller, and walking next to them was (I would guess) their five year old son. The boy was really cute; his parents were obviously of Latino descent and he had blond hair and blue eyes with a dark complexion. His attitude, however, was, oh how to put this delicately: naughty.
So we are walking by them, we smiled, said hi, and the little %@()%# turned around, wound up with all the strength his five year old body could muster and chucked an empty Frito wrapper at me screaming at the top of his lungs "YOU GOT TRASH BOMBED!!!" I smiled and kept walking, P started laughing and I said "I have to blog about this."
In my day, if I would have "trash bombed" anyone, I would have been busted. Not only would my dad have punished me with manual labor, but my mom would have made me write an essay about why "trash bombing" was impolite and in that discussion I would need to provide a detailed analysis of what constitutes appropriate action when we encounter people we don't know.
Seriously, where do kids learn this stuff?
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