Parents everywhere are completely different - in the way they discipline, the things they try to teach their kids, what they feed them ... everything. But there is one thing that is alike in all parents. The Fear. The fear that your children will embarrass you in public.
This also used to be my fear. Not anymore. I don't fear it. That is the first step to surviving. You have to accept that it will happen. My outlook changed after New Years this year. Now, I just hope that it will never be this bad again.
We decided that we would go to the zoo on New Years Day. Have a great day with the family. It almost ended with me leaving the little one to fend for himself.
We had walked in, we were looking around at all of the animals, just having a good time. Then we get to the monkey area. Let me see if I can explain this so that everyone understands the horror that I went through.
At the beginning of the monkey section of the zoo, there are some statues of some chimps. These statues happen to be ... let's say, anatomically correct. You just closed your eyes and said, "Oh my gosh", didn't you? My thoughts exactly.
Peyton runs up to these statues and grabs on. You can guess where. Then he looks back at me and yells, "Mom!! He has a WEENIE!!"
I was hoping that the earth would open up and swallow me whole. In the split second after he yelled that, I contemplated turning away and pretending that I didn't know him. I was horrified. And of course, he wouldn't do it when there was no one around, no. There were probably 8-10 other families close by. You know what all of them were thinking? They were praising everything holy that it wasn't their child that had done that. Just like I would have done.
There's no way I could recover from that one gracefully. I took his hand and pulled him away as quickly as I could. Sad part is, we need to find another zoo to go to. Maybe in another state.
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