I feel the need to balance the blog out by...well, blogging and not just picture posting...so here goes. Last week I was at the grocery store and on the way home I blew out two tires on a faulty road, had to call a flat bed truck from an hour away, my car battery went dead as a doornail, and my alignment needed to be...realigned. Really. True story. Luckily, my knight in shining armor and his two side kicks saw me on their way home and let me hitch a ride. But, that's not what this post is about. Ha, had ya there didn't I?

So, I'm at the store and I was perusing some grub and walked to where another lady was already pulling out some frozen food. I just stood there and waited for her to finish and watched her kids as she did. I had noticed kind of a weird guy walking around the store and at this time he came near all of us. He had on some scrubby looking clothes, some kind of long scraggly beard, and to be honest, smelled a little. I didn't look at him, but watched the kids' reactions to him. They stopped in their tracks and stared. I guess he was trying pass by all of us in the aisle, but I was too busy watching the kids to notice what he was doing. The older girl (probably about 8 or 9) said to her brother, "move over. When someone wants to get through you have to let them pass us by." The mother looked at the kids and said, "Only if they say excuse me! If they don't say excuse me, you don't move" And then yelled at them to move out of her way.

Hmph. Well, I don't know if she was saying this for me to hear, but I was patiently waiting for her to finish, or for the guy. Either way, I was flabbergasted. Being a teacher, I thought that if those were my students I would have agreed with the girl and said, yes it's polite to move out of someone's way. But this mother was telling them something totally against what I would have instructed. What's a kid to believe? How confusing it must be for kids to hear mixed messages. And how sad it is that the mother has that attitude. And then I blew two tires on the way home.