Kicking Babies

I don't think the title of this blog is funny at all. I mean how atrocious to kick a baby. This should not be funny...right?

My daughter regularly attends a dance class in which there is a high turnover rate. This means every one to three weeks the girls (or boys) are different or new. Tonight was no exception. This makes it very interesting for me as the parent.

I get to sit back and watch the different parenting styles that come into the dance studio. There are some parents who are considerate, discipline well, follow through on what they say, etc. etc. These are the parents that I enjoy being around. Then there are the "other" parents.

Now I know I'm not mom of the year. I like to think though that I've done a pretty decent job on my own for the last five years. I do what I can, I know it's not perfect, but I love her more than anything and I try to do what's best for her.

These "other" parents can vary from the family that looks like they just crawled out of the meth lab to come to dance class (not kidding here), to the teenage mom who thinks that her 3-year-old is just the cutest thing in the world no matter how much she is acting up, not listening to the teacher, disobeying her mom and dad etc. It drives me nuts. I don't know if it is because I'm also paying for my daughter to learn there and she cannot learn if the other children are acting up, or if it just annoys me to see parents who don't follow through on what they say to their children such as the commonly heard phrase, "If you don't listen we are going to leave and go home." Repeated 20 times throughout the class, but they never actually haul the kid out of class to teach them a lesson. One time is all it would take for any normal child and they would come back to class and be ready to listen. These parents cannot follow through. It drives me nuts.

Tonight there were two new girls in class. They were both younger, but fairly well behaved girls. Yes, they did have a fair amount of energy and sometimes ran around when they weren't supposed to, but all in all I thought they were very decent children. The mother of one of them though, I questioned her actions. She is one of these mothers who thinks that it is just "so cute!" everything that goes on with her children. She had the 3-year-old in the dance class, and then she had a probably 9-month-old crawling around on the floor.

When I say crawling around on the floor, I mean this baby is crawling around on the dance floor when the girls are trying to dance around her. I'm not sure what the mom was thinking other than, "Awww....it's SO Cute! She wants to be a dancer!" Needless to say, the baby was in the way. A few times I wondered if the baby was going to be taken out by the girls dancing around, but at the last moment the mom would call the baby back over and get her out of the way. The very last dance that they do is called the baby doll dance. This is a fun dance that takes up the majority of the dance floor. They are leaping and galloping all over the floor. One of the last things that they do is a dancers kick in which they kick their legs out in front of them up into the air. It's fast, fun, and they do indeed use the whole dance floor, part of which the baby was crawling all over.

So the mom sees the line of girls coming her direction and towards the baby who continues to crawl towards the dancers. Then the baby comes to a stop in the middle of the dance floor and just watches the dancers as they do their dancer kicks. The older girl gets right up to the baby and kicks her right in the side....hard.

The mom of course is baffled by this behavior and cannot figure out why her daughter would kick the baby. Duh. She's in the middle of the floor. So instead of the mother figuring out that she is the one who is an idiot, the oldest child gets in trouble for kicking the baby.

I laughed.

I know this is probably not nice and I definitely didn't want the baby to be hurt, but really?? The mom really didn't see that coming? I mean I could see it from the time they started the dance five minutes ago. She acted like it was such a surprise.

Lesson to those with children: When there is a dance class going on, please don't let your baby crawl all over the floor. It inhibits the rest of the dancers (my daughter) and is a hazard to your own child.

Stupid parents.