some kids' parents!

Lately on Fridays Evelyn and I have been attending Toddler Time at a nearby library. This library is decently stocked for being a smaller town, they have a big kids section with little tables and chairs, and Toddler Time is a free half-hour program for toddlers and their parents--it's 20 minutes of stories and songs followed by a little art project.

Evelyn loves it, and of course I love spending this time with her, but today the room was packed (usually it's like 6 or 7 kids, today it was at least double. At least.), with parents who don't care to discipline their very disruptive children! This is story time people, not gymnastics! Tell your obnoxious children to sit on their carpet squares and pay attention to the nice lady with the books (like my little girl, look how nice she's sitting!), and if they continue to not listen then you should probably leave because you're ruining it for others!

Also, it should be noted that this half hour is for children between 18 months and 3 years. They have other classes for children who fall outside of this age range, both younger and older. TAKE YOUR CHILDREN TO THE APPROPRIATE CLASS.  One mom brought her two children, neither of which were the appropriate age--her daughter who was too young (I even overheard her say "she's too young to even be in this class"-- then wtf did you bring her?!) was crawling all over the place and on the brink of a tantrum, while her son, who had to be almost 4, kept standing right in front, jumping around and doing handstands, and kicked another little girl in the head (I am not exaggerating!)--totally blocking Evelyn's view, by the way, and just being really disruptive and disrespectful to everyone else in the room.

A few times the mom told him to sit down, but he didn't listen. And she told him to sit down. And he didn't listen. And this went on the entire time.

I understand that not all kids are like Evelyn and able to sit calmly through story time, and while it's great to see so many people bringing their kids to the library, if your child is treating story time like it's the playground, and refuses to listen to you, it's probably best to leave.

I don't know, but if that was my kid I would have left. 

Evelyn saw some of the other kids standing up (plenty of others were sitting nice), and so she stood up too but I right away told her that she has to sit down until the story is done so that the kids behind her can see the pictures too. And she sat right down.

On a totally unrelated note, on the way home we stopped at the grocery store in town where we had our first ever experience of a power outage while grocery shopping. Maybe all the heavy snow knocked down a power line or something? And for some reason the generators didn't kick on. Evelyn and I snacked on some donut and cookie samples in the dark. Yum yum!