Labor Day

Today we attended the Labor Day parade here in our little town, and once again I am amazed at the people one encounters at a parade.

In addition to the scheduled groups like the fire department, Shriners, Amvets, etc. there were the ever popular parade of teenaged mothers, the overweight girls in hot pants and half shirts, the young men with pit bulls (and two with snakes), the old men in stained wife beater t's and my personal favorite: mothers who let their children run wild and then get pissed when someone says something about it.

As with most parade, there was a lot of candy being thrown from the floats into the crowd, and Old Baby and friend would scramble to pick up every piece they could in "our area" in front of our chairs. One slightly older girl kept coming over and fighting with my kid and her friend over these various crappy candies (mostly Tootsie Rolls-ew!) I was, truthfully, getting annoyed with this little girl because it seems that there is an unspoken rule during these events that you stay within your own boundaries and don't infringe on the candy grubbing of others.

After about 45 minutes of this, Old Baby approaches me in tears because she says the girl in question pushed her. I approach this little girl and ask her where her mommy is, and suggest that she stay closer to mommy because it wasn't fair to the other kids that they weren't getting a chance at the candy and that it seemed things were getting too rough...and that's when her lovely mother starts yelling at me from behind. She claims that her daughter wasn't "doin'nothin'" and on and on and she was sitting "right there" and gestures to a spot about 1/2 a block down.

I'm thinking that she has just proven my point, that she was too far away to see what was going on and why wasn't she telling her daughter to stop being a candy bully, and besides-if my daughter says that someone pushed her it's my job to believe her and make sure that it doesn't continue...but at the same time I'm thinking that this is about the most stupid arguement that an adult can have and maybe I shouldn't have said anything because now it has become a spectacle.

I try to calmly explain that my daughter claims that she was pushed, and that I simply felt that her daughter should stay closer to her...and she continues to yell but finally walks away, picks up one of her other younger children, a baby, sits down and lights a cigarette, blows smoke in baby's face.

Ah, parenting at it's finest.