My son and several of his friends attend the same preschool, and yesterday I had the privilege of behaving like a deranged, psychotic loon when one of them pulled Ye Old Disappearing Act during pickup time.
The mom and I scrambled to find her, just seconds after she took off, and I spotted her turning a corner and heading out of sight.
As I pursued her, yelling my head off for her to stop or for someone to stop her, people stared at me. Clearly they had absorbed the effect (Meghan’s gone crazy!) but not the cause (little girl headed for the front door! Street! Cars! ROGUE BABY!!!).
In this particular instance, it was important to protect the child from the world AND to protect the world from the child in about equal parts. So thank goodness we stopped her.
For Preventing the Overthrow of Democracy and your salvation from inevitable Rule by Small Tyrant, we can thank, in no particular order, and definitely not in order of importance: 1. I wear sensible shoes. 2. I have no sense of personal dignity. 3. I’ve been working out. 4. We out numbered her and could split up to cover more ground like predators in the veldt.
I would hesitate to grab someone else’s child who was running away and I know a lot of other people would, too, but I can’t be alone in feeling perfectly comfortable blocking a doorway and asking a small child if she’s lost her grownup. So we must assume that what was at work here was a failure to communicate, as opposed to a desire to see how much havoc could be wrought by one unsupervised 3.5 year old, loose in the wide, wide suburbs- nothing between her and world domination but a paltry automatic door.
Since children have been moving faster than the human eye can see since the dawn of time, and it doesn’t seem like they’ll stop anytime soon, we clearly need a universal way to alert other adults to STOP THAT CHILD. Something that gets as immediate and visceral a response as “FIRE!!!”
A harpoon gun, while handy, is probably out of the question, so I am here to ask you, oh Wise and Wonderful Joy Makin’ Mamas, how do we let the community at large that a child has gone rogue? I mean, not this particular child, who’ll be spending the next 26.5 years duct taped to her mother, but other people’s children who decide to try their luck with the automatic door.
My course of action convinced everyone I was nuts. I’m not saying that conclusion was WRONG, but in this particular situation it was incomplete. Therefore, the question of the day is, what SHOULD I have been screaming as I ran down the mezzanine, encumbered by my own two kids and about 30 extraneous pounds? (Or is “harpoon gun” our only option?)
