The Incident

It's only taken me a couple of weeks to be ready to blog about this one day from the month.  Here's the text I sent my friend when it all happened:

"So....Bitty got in trouble for vandalizing school property today. When we got home she was so upset about it she had diarrhea. While I was dealing with that, Bundle pulled down her undies and pooped in the little potty by herself. Meanwhile, Stomper was making pumpkin cookies that needed to come out of the oven and Troy was calling and asking about dinner. And THAT, my friend, is motherhood."

Definitely a highlight from the month.  You know it's going to be a good afternoon when you bump into a friend who spent the morning volunteering in your daughter's class and she warns you that the teacher is going to be waiting for you after school to talk to you about your daughter's behavior.  She was so sweet, this nice mommy - she assured me that her daughter had misbehaved thoroughly enough for a chat with the teacher once and that I would be okay.  Funny - who cares about the dang naughty kids, it's the traumatized and guilt ridden moms we need to worry about!

So I prepared myself.  Took a deep breath and went to the playground, where indeed, my sweet 1st grader's teacher was waiting for me.  And had a talk with me and Bitty about vandalizing school property.  WHAT?!?!?! Oh, poor Bitty.  She was absolutely crumbling with shame and horror.  I guess she and two little friends had grabbed some crayons and decided to decorate a concrete bench on the playground during lunch recess.  It was all very innocent - I'm sure they thought it was basically like sidewalk chalk.  But it was a very big deal to the school and to her teacher.  She even had to write a letter to the principal.  I am not faulting her teacher at all - Miss Blank was never biting or belittling, just clear on the fact that coloring outside with crayons was not okay.  But it was pretty severe.  And Bitty was just crushed. You can read from the text what the afternoon was like. And to top it off, when I was able to take a breath after taking care of all those crisis I discovered that Stomper had spent my busy time trying to cheat on his homework. A banner day in the Preslar household, that's for sure.

We've recovered.  Bitty and I learned that cleaning crayon off of cement is unpleasant but not insurmountable, Stomper learned that he will die a slow death if he tries cheating again.  Bundle continues her potty training progress, so I guess it was a good day after all.

Bitty's bench-art was slightly charming, and I hoped that no one noticed me sneaking a few pictures of it before we started scrubbing it off.  The best part of the art was that the girls implicated themselves quite clearly by writing their names on their work of vandalism.  Of course, they were caught red-handed anyway, but I thought that was pretty funny. Also humorous was the fact that the little perpetrators who had to clean the crayon up were supposed to be suffering terribly as they cleaned, but they rather enjoyed it.  And every single 1st grader was gathered around us asking if they could help or complaining that we were only letting those three girls do the fun part.  Somewhat of a backfire but I loved it in a very Tom Sawyer kind of way.