I literally did this exact same thing last week with Juni!! However, I was actually on the blacktop (I forgot to email the school letting them know I'd be picking her up, even though I pick her up every single Wednesday). I thought for a minute that the bus attendant wasn't going to let me take her, and she made me talk to Juni's teacher, who still seemed unsure if I should take her since it wasn't protocol. I was like, "so the other option is that you send her home on the bus to an empty, locked house..." 😂
If it makes you feel better, I once walked home from kindergarten by myself, without anyone’s permission, completely eluding the teacher, bus monitors, and my babysitter, simply because I wanted to see if I could do it, and I missed my mom, who worked from home. I plotted my route while riding the bus to school for a week before I did it, and some maternal fifth graders helped me cross the one busy street involved. I was so tired when I got there (it was probably a mile walk) that I collapsed into the front hallway crying, to my mom’s astonishment. I remember zero consequences for anyone involved. But I can imagine it was an “oh BLEEP” moment for every adult link in that chain.
My kids both have frequent doctor appointment and therapy that I have to pick them up from school early for. Kid 2 typically has more appointments, and earlier in the week I had picked him up for therapy. Two days later, I went to the school and had the front desk call Kid 2 down to leave for the day. 2 minutes later I was like, "OH SHIT! Wrong kid!" and realized I needed Kid 1, not Kid 2. I was so embarrassed and felt awful for disrupting Kid 2's class unnecessarily. The registrar thought it was hilarious, thankfully, and my mom (a second grade teacher) reassured me and said I'm not the only parent to have done that but I felt like such a goof. *insert Picard facepalm gif here*
Mine is a lose my cool moment. We had just gotten home from vacation on Sunday and I had armfuls of our vacation mail. My daughter (10) offered to help so I asked her to grab a package that was still in the car right behind me. Her brother (8) was still interested the car and grabbed it right after I said it, so I asked her to grab some of the mail that was overwhelming my carrying capacity. Instead, she stormed off, started screaming and crying and even when I said, "there's still all this, will you still please help?" She said, "only if I can carry that one box that J took!!" And then stormed into the house carrying nothing, not even her stuff. So when I got in the house, I threw all the mail on the floor and yelled, "thanks for helping!" Ugh. Way to model good behavior, me.
My husband and I have back patio “dates” where we, weather permitting, retreat to the back patio with a couple of beverages and our kids are supposed to leave us alone and watch tv. This past Saturday younger child was needing attention and interrupting us at regular intervals. She’s 8, soon to be 9, and at the fifth interruption (“will you walk with me to the bathroom?”) I lost my mind. I screamed at her and chased her to the bathroom, where she barricaded herself in, crying. My older kid ran for cover in his bedroom. I hate that a combination of exhaustion (older kid and I returned from a 13-hour BSA Scout day trip) and alcohol made me a monster. My younger kid is off-the-charts large for her age, and verbally advanced as well, so even I forget how young she truly is. If I can’t give her grace to be emotionally 8 years old, how do her teachers treat her? How does the world see her?p
If I forget to put utensils in my kid’s lunchbox, they just won’t eat the main portion of their lunch … even though there’s a full kitchen right next to the lunch room, and any teacher would be happy to grab them a fork or spoon!
I admittedly am struggling now that my daughter is 7yo to encourage her to be more independent -- i.e., put her own shoes & socks on, carry her own things, get her own snack. This week, I forgot to bring her backpack to school. I know she's old enough to get it herself. But I'm in a hurry in the morning! I think that's my main problem: It's just faster and easier to do it on my own then get in a big power struggle with her.
Oh my goodness my attempt at teaching critical thinking completely backfired. So my daughter (5) was asking about whether unicorns were real, and I took the opportunity to try to establish a mental framework: things can either be fact (they're true and we can prove it), fiction (intentionally made up/they're not true and we can prove it), or belief (we can't prove whether they're real or not, so it's a matter of belief/opinion. I started with some easy facts and easy fictions, and then we circled back to unicorns. And she said that there weren't unicorns on our planet, but we couldn't prove that they didn't exist somewhere else, so they must be a belief—which I thought was a really smart answer. Then, she asked about the Easter Bunny. And I should caveat that Easter is probably her favorite holiday. So we talked it through, and decided that the Easter Bunny was a belief. So far so good.
Then... she asked if *I* believe in the Easter Bunny. I thought about it for a moment, but then decided I shouldn't lie to her, so I said no. And it BROKE HER. She started crying and wailing and ran to her room, and when I could get words out of her, she said she was sad and hurt that I didn't believe. It took nearly 30 minutes to calm her down again. Total FAIL!
Sigh. Missed my kid’s belated half-birthday celebration at school. This is the first year that parents have been invited to these classroom celebrations since pre-pandemic times, and she was out sick for her originally scheduled day; after two and a half weeks of both kids with double ear infections and interminable sick days, I simply forgot to change the date in our family calendar. She was disappointed, for sure, but not heartbroken. She isn’t a kid who likes to be the center of attention, and she’d been waffling on whether she wanted to ask her teacher if she could skip it in the first place. My partner, bless his heart, required two days of near constant reassurance that he hadn’t failed completely as a parent. We don’t normally celebrate half-birthdays, as a family, but her class does this for the summer bday kids so that everyone gets a celebration day. Not the worst thing ever, but… not making me feel like an awesome, caring, involved parent.
Every year I always seem to forget it’s picture day so my younger son is in every picture in like a sports tank top or other wild attire and his hair Crazy 😜. It’s almost like a running joke at this point we next year he’ll be in 5th grade and I have done this for at least 2-3 years now!
I went in to read to my daughters class and at her request brought the book Eloise and I forgot how inappropriate it is... pictures of people smoking and drinking and just generally glorifying bratty behavior. So embarrassing!
Thank you all for this thread. I’ve read it 3 or 4 times during a really tough stretch of parenting involving 2-3 weeks of illness, including a case of bronchitis for myself, and lots of toddler tantrums (and a few mommy tantrums too). Seeing everyone’s stories and compassion has really helped.
I literally did this exact same thing last week with Juni!! However, I was actually on the blacktop (I forgot to email the school letting them know I'd be picking her up, even though I pick her up every single Wednesday). I thought for a minute that the bus attendant wasn't going to let me take her, and she made me talk to Juni's teacher, who still seemed unsure if I should take her since it wasn't protocol. I was like, "so the other option is that you send her home on the bus to an empty, locked house..." 😂
If it makes you feel better, I once walked home from kindergarten by myself, without anyone’s permission, completely eluding the teacher, bus monitors, and my babysitter, simply because I wanted to see if I could do it, and I missed my mom, who worked from home. I plotted my route while riding the bus to school for a week before I did it, and some maternal fifth graders helped me cross the one busy street involved. I was so tired when I got there (it was probably a mile walk) that I collapsed into the front hallway crying, to my mom’s astonishment. I remember zero consequences for anyone involved. But I can imagine it was an “oh BLEEP” moment for every adult link in that chain.
My kids both have frequent doctor appointment and therapy that I have to pick them up from school early for. Kid 2 typically has more appointments, and earlier in the week I had picked him up for therapy. Two days later, I went to the school and had the front desk call Kid 2 down to leave for the day. 2 minutes later I was like, "OH SHIT! Wrong kid!" and realized I needed Kid 1, not Kid 2. I was so embarrassed and felt awful for disrupting Kid 2's class unnecessarily. The registrar thought it was hilarious, thankfully, and my mom (a second grade teacher) reassured me and said I'm not the only parent to have done that but I felt like such a goof. *insert Picard facepalm gif here*
Mine is a lose my cool moment. We had just gotten home from vacation on Sunday and I had armfuls of our vacation mail. My daughter (10) offered to help so I asked her to grab a package that was still in the car right behind me. Her brother (8) was still interested the car and grabbed it right after I said it, so I asked her to grab some of the mail that was overwhelming my carrying capacity. Instead, she stormed off, started screaming and crying and even when I said, "there's still all this, will you still please help?" She said, "only if I can carry that one box that J took!!" And then stormed into the house carrying nothing, not even her stuff. So when I got in the house, I threw all the mail on the floor and yelled, "thanks for helping!" Ugh. Way to model good behavior, me.
My husband and I have back patio “dates” where we, weather permitting, retreat to the back patio with a couple of beverages and our kids are supposed to leave us alone and watch tv. This past Saturday younger child was needing attention and interrupting us at regular intervals. She’s 8, soon to be 9, and at the fifth interruption (“will you walk with me to the bathroom?”) I lost my mind. I screamed at her and chased her to the bathroom, where she barricaded herself in, crying. My older kid ran for cover in his bedroom. I hate that a combination of exhaustion (older kid and I returned from a 13-hour BSA Scout day trip) and alcohol made me a monster. My younger kid is off-the-charts large for her age, and verbally advanced as well, so even I forget how young she truly is. If I can’t give her grace to be emotionally 8 years old, how do her teachers treat her? How does the world see her?p
If I forget to put utensils in my kid’s lunchbox, they just won’t eat the main portion of their lunch … even though there’s a full kitchen right next to the lunch room, and any teacher would be happy to grab them a fork or spoon!
I admittedly am struggling now that my daughter is 7yo to encourage her to be more independent -- i.e., put her own shoes & socks on, carry her own things, get her own snack. This week, I forgot to bring her backpack to school. I know she's old enough to get it herself. But I'm in a hurry in the morning! I think that's my main problem: It's just faster and easier to do it on my own then get in a big power struggle with her.
Oh my goodness my attempt at teaching critical thinking completely backfired. So my daughter (5) was asking about whether unicorns were real, and I took the opportunity to try to establish a mental framework: things can either be fact (they're true and we can prove it), fiction (intentionally made up/they're not true and we can prove it), or belief (we can't prove whether they're real or not, so it's a matter of belief/opinion. I started with some easy facts and easy fictions, and then we circled back to unicorns. And she said that there weren't unicorns on our planet, but we couldn't prove that they didn't exist somewhere else, so they must be a belief—which I thought was a really smart answer. Then, she asked about the Easter Bunny. And I should caveat that Easter is probably her favorite holiday. So we talked it through, and decided that the Easter Bunny was a belief. So far so good.
Then... she asked if *I* believe in the Easter Bunny. I thought about it for a moment, but then decided I shouldn't lie to her, so I said no. And it BROKE HER. She started crying and wailing and ran to her room, and when I could get words out of her, she said she was sad and hurt that I didn't believe. It took nearly 30 minutes to calm her down again. Total FAIL!
Sigh. Missed my kid’s belated half-birthday celebration at school. This is the first year that parents have been invited to these classroom celebrations since pre-pandemic times, and she was out sick for her originally scheduled day; after two and a half weeks of both kids with double ear infections and interminable sick days, I simply forgot to change the date in our family calendar. She was disappointed, for sure, but not heartbroken. She isn’t a kid who likes to be the center of attention, and she’d been waffling on whether she wanted to ask her teacher if she could skip it in the first place. My partner, bless his heart, required two days of near constant reassurance that he hadn’t failed completely as a parent. We don’t normally celebrate half-birthdays, as a family, but her class does this for the summer bday kids so that everyone gets a celebration day. Not the worst thing ever, but… not making me feel like an awesome, caring, involved parent.
Every year I always seem to forget it’s picture day so my younger son is in every picture in like a sports tank top or other wild attire and his hair Crazy 😜. It’s almost like a running joke at this point we next year he’ll be in 5th grade and I have done this for at least 2-3 years now!
I went in to read to my daughters class and at her request brought the book Eloise and I forgot how inappropriate it is... pictures of people smoking and drinking and just generally glorifying bratty behavior. So embarrassing!
Thank you all for this thread. I’ve read it 3 or 4 times during a really tough stretch of parenting involving 2-3 weeks of illness, including a case of bronchitis for myself, and lots of toddler tantrums (and a few mommy tantrums too). Seeing everyone’s stories and compassion has really helped.