owen gets punked…
parents are weird. i don’t know why. they just are. when we were out in austin, owen discovered the joy (and then the terror) of the public playground there.
owen has been relatively timid on the slide. at first it scared him, but the more and more he used it, the more and more excited he got. he’d run up the stairs (as much as his stubby little legs would allow him) and then run over to the slide… wait for me and then slide down. he’d jump off the other end and repeat this process ad nauseam.
after a while, i stepped away to make a phone call and kara took over the ‘don’t-let-his-head-hit-the-slide’ duty. on his four thousandth trip to the mouth of the slide, owen’s path was blocked by a larger, older boy. doing what we taught him, owen put out his fist to bump knuckles in his familiar greeting and either this boy saw that as a threat or was just a plain a-hole, he pushed owen down on the slide platform. owen landed on his face, bit his lip and bled everywhere.
and it’s not like i expect the mother to do anything about it, but owen started screaming (and bleeding) all over the place. and when that boy wants to scream, he can sure scream. anyways, the other boy’s mother came running over and professed to kara that she “knew exactly which one did it…” but offered much less in the way of apology. it was weird… and something, no doubt, that we have to get used to.
i just hope owen isn’t the playyard bully anytime soon. that would break what is left of my cold-dead heart.
