My New BFF

Originally posted: 10/15/2008
Yesterday I drove for my son's school field trip. It pretty much wrecked my entire day and possibly my life, but at least it was informative and the kids learned a lot.

To elaborate, I was completely devestated by my child's behavior when he was with his friends, with no teachers around. Mind you, he behaved during the learning time, did exactly as he was told by the teacher, blah blah blah. But when it came time to be with me and his friends, he was a holy terror. He wouldn't listen to me at all. I couldn't even imagine what some poor mom would've had to go through if she would've been the one driving him instead of me. This was his first field trip of the year, I went on all of them last year and he never behaved like this. I attribute it to the fact that there were only 6 little boys in his kindergarten class and there are like 14 this year and so he has all these friends now and when they get together they feed off each other and act like fools. That's one thing, but not listening to your mother is another whole story. After the field trip I grounded him from playing with friends after school, told him he'd be going to bed a half hour early and said we'd have a talk when I picked him up.

So I picked him up after school, he was in a great mood, like nothing even happened.....meanwhile I'm a straight wreck thinking all day about the monster that I've been raising. I proceeded to explain to him that I expected the best behavior out of him from now on, both at school on his own and when he's with me. I told him I was going to ask for updates from his teacher and that if he behaved as badly as he did at the field trip with his friends at school I would be dropping his sister off at a friends house and he would have a new best friend at school. That best friend would be me. I would sit by him in class, I would sit by him at lunch, I would sit by him at art and music, and best of all, he and I would sit together on the bench at recesses. We'd be inseparable. Let me say that I've had to use this threat before, on my daughter. The difference was that her teacher came to me and told me that there were some problems with her talking too much in class. I told her what I expected and that settled it, she wasn't....well....dumb enough to do it in front of me like her brother. So, he knows the stakes now, he may just be too clueless to take me seriously and that is when the wrecking of my life comes into play as I will have to actually follow through with my threat of being his best friend. My daughter knew better than to test my threat, I really don't think my son knows better. That's one of the hazardous parts of being a parent, sometimes we have to do what we say. It's miserable for the kid......but it's horribly miserable for us.