I wanted to get to a specific point in this post, but I had to sort of set you up with where I’m coming from first. So just bear with me here. :)

I have to admit it – while I’m the mom of two kids, I’m really not a kid person. Surprised? It seems that a lot of women have that built-in mommy-ability to be sweet, soft-spoken, patient and nurturing with children, their own or someone else’s. It’s a trait I see often at the kids’ school: teachers who have that gift to work with and handle children like magic. But for some of us, kids are like untrained dogs who push when you pull and run off leaving you feeling helpless, powerless, and ready to pull out your hair.

The thought of babysitting someone else’s kids usually makes me cringe, especially if they aren’t well-behaved kids. I had an experience once of having a gal come over to play with us and she decided to squeeze glue all over someone’s bedsheets and pillow, and to hack to pieces a $200 Lego Star Wars spaceship. I called her mom to pick her up asap.

Having just that one experience (oh, I’ve seen more, trust me) it’s really no surprise to me when I hear people (USUALLY younger, single boys males) say how kids are little *expletives* and that they’d never want to have kids or be around kids or date someone with kids.  You see the screeching, snotty two-year old pulling on his parents or hitting a sibling at a restaurant, you see a 13-year old girl flip off her grandmother, well you get the point. It’s no secret that there are some spoiled, poorly raised kids in the world.

But if they are GOOD kids, kids who do well and try hard with the occasional hiccup because they have yet to refine their own social graces and manners, or they forget, or they run out of patience after 15 minutes of waiting for something and ask again “are we there yet” or “is it done yet” – well, is that really enough to make you hate a child? To cringe to be around them?

Kids in general don’t bother me. As a matter of fact, I find quite a bit of humor while just hanging around kids. They really do say the darndest things. They’re little people, not yet full of all the information they need to be adults like the rest of us. The only time a kid really bothers me is: if they’re incredibly rude; they won’t listen to ANYONE; they pick their nose and eat it in front of me; they are mean to or hurt my kid (or someone else’s). Even then, I’m not mad at the child. I’m annoyed at their parents for not teaching them and enforcing rules of acceptable behavior. The mother who says quietly “Now Johnny, don’t hit mommy. Now Johnny, stop biting the baby. Johnny we don’t throw knives at kittens” without giving discipline for repeated offenses, well, she deserves to be knocked upside the head. “Now Johnny” doesn’t cut it for some kids.

You probably want me to get to the point already. Ok ok, I’m getting there… read on to my next post. :)

PET PEEVE: I really hate it when I’m talking on the phone with another parent and their child starts talking to the parent. It’s not the child’s talking to the parent that bothers me at all. It’s the parent stopping in mid-sentence when talking to me, chatting with the child for 30-60 seconds and then saying to them “I can’t talk right now, I’m on the phone.” Wait, what? You just talked to your kid – which told them you can talk while on the phone. So telling them that now you can’t probably doesn’t make much sense to them and they will continue to talk to you when you are on the phone on other occasions.  On the other hand, it would not bother me if the parent said to me “excuse me for just a moment”, told the child that they were on the phone to come back later, and got back to me.