Not such a bad mom after all…

Today was Ashley’s open house for a summer preschool program.  A few interesting things happened and I learned that I am not a bad parent, nor is my daughter nearly as bad as I feared.  Ashley is stubborn like me and her father.  I’m hoping as she gets older we will be able to channel this into something good, but right now it means she refuses to be potty-trained.  This is a problem because she cannot attend the program that I am paying for until she is potty-trained.  I can cancel any sessions up to the Monday beforehand without any fees being tacked on, so I need to either get her potty trained this weekend, or get the first session canceled on Monday.  Here’s the funny thing, she knows when she has to go but will only tell me if she is in the bathtub.  I think this has to do with the last time she pooped in the tub and I was sternly disappointed.  I wish I could remember the incident clearly because she hasn’t had an accident in the bathtub since then.

Anyway at the open house there was this pretty little blond girl.  For the longest time I couldn’t figure out who her parents were because no one was keeping an eye on her that I could tell and there were no natural blondes among the parents.  Well during the open house when my mom had her back in the classroom since she was being a little girl, Blondie started pushing Ashley around and taking toys away from her.  I don’t know this was happening so when we migrated back to the classroom I was oblivious to this history.  At one point during the presentation on the program, Ashley went to the back of the room where one of the teachers was and discovered a hamster in a cage.  She watched his animal in his cage intently for several minutes when Blondie came over and pushed her out of the way.  I went to get out of my chair but the teacher motioned that it was ok, so I decided to wait and see what would happen next.  (Which is my favorite thing to do!)  Blondie kept pushing Ashley, and Ashley kept pushing back.  After several minutes passed, I retrieved Ashley and had her sit with me for a while.  Ashley stayed away from Blondie at that point.

This brings me to Blondie’s brother, Noisy.  Noisy is just like any other little boy and loves to make a racket.  He had a good pout after he put a toy down and another boy took it for a while which isn’t unusual at this age.  He commenced smashing the toy airplane into a bunch of objects around him and just making a nuisance of himself in general.  It was so loud the presenter kept losing her train of thought!  Again I did not witness any attention from the people I later learned were the parents, or any disciplinary action for his destructive and disruptive acts.  The mom spent the entire open house knitting like that was the most important thing in the world to her!  When she finally was moved to speak to her son about respecting school property, she said they would put the toy in ‘time out’.  I’m sorry but it was not the toy that was making that noise of its own volition, so why would you punish the toy which happens to be an inanimate object?  Knits (the mom) didn’t look like the disciplining type and at first I assumed she was accompanying someone else since she paid no attention to the presentation or any of the children.  I hope that those kids are not in preschool the days that Ashley will be attending or we may be in for some problems in the future.  By the way, the colors Knit was using were hideous.

Someone I went to school with was there with her son and I have to say it was odd seeing her.  Lauren looks old for her age and I know she’s got to be 26 or close to it like me.  Don’t get me wrong, she’s still pretty and everything but she would have looked better at 26 if she’d cut back on time at the tanning booth a bit.  Her tan just looked odd, so I think she make be using a spray on but her skin looked leathery.  I guess I’m glad now that I could never commit to going to the tanning salon when it wasn’t preparation for a vacation.  I would love to be a little darker, or at least make some of my old tan lines disappear.  I have one on my right arm from an epic burn when we were in Mexico last year visiting Alberto.  I charbroiled my arm from about mid-bicep on down for sitting in a car for 2 hours with the sun beating on my unprotected arm.  Ashley was vomiting in the backseat so you’ll understand I wasn’t worried so much about my arm, but rather my poor sick baby in the back seat.  The rest of our time in Mexico was dotted with random people coming up to me offering sunscreen or aloe vera lotion for my arm.  I was dubbed ‘la más tostada’ and so Ashley became ‘hija de la tostada’ every time she did something worth commenting on.

Those memories still make me smile.  Hopefully we get to make some more memories like that soon!

Ciao

La más tostada