Tony The Terrible

01/12/06 | knowseverything

[knowseverything]

A recent article apparently shocking enough to make cnn.com's front page yesterday boldly uncovered the fact that Britain's Prime Minister, Tony Blair, “smacks” his kids. While this must be terribly horrific information to the left leaning viewers of this particular web site, it is hardly newsworthy to normal Americans.

Reading the article I was suddenly reminded of a situation I found myself in a few years back, and which I will never put myself in again. Unless of course, Tony is by my side.

My wife found out that a local Baptist church had a “parents night out” program where couples could take their children on a Friday night for three hours, and have an evening without the kids. Sounded great, and the only catch was you had to serve your time as babysitter every fifth Friday. This was perfect for me since I generally thought I liked to hang out with kids anyway(emphasis on thought). So after a few relaxing Friday dinners with my wife, our turn to serve rolled around. I looked forward to an evening of horse play and games. This was going to be great.

We found ourselves assigned to the four and five year old room, which to me seemed perfect. I later realized however, we were the new comers and had just been given latrine duty. The room had 12, four and five year old kids with an even mixture of boys and girls.

The first thing I noticed that was a bit strange, was a couple of recently adopted Russian kids who apparently wanted to do nothing but sit in the corner and stab plastic fruit with little toy knives from the kitchen set. OK, I thought quietly to myself, that's a little weird, but hey, I've never been to Russia..... I then decided to gather everyone around for a good old fashioned game of Duck, Duck, Goose to break the ice and get things started. This was going well, until a pair of twin boys thought it would be fun to simply yell “Goose!!” on their own and randomly tackle the smaller kids. It didn't take long for this to break out into a mini-riot where the smaller boys and the girls quickly became the “innocent civilians”. Verbal warnings like,”Hey quit smashing her over the head with that plastic brick!”, were having little to no effect.

Things were reaching the point where, in my house, I would be employing a number of preliminary tactics. The first being the "ear grabber". A simple, mildly annoying move, put into use in the rare occasion where verbal warnings are no longer effective. The "ear grabber", is also interchangeable with the “Vulcan arm pincher” which is especially useful in public places where kids sometimes think they have the advantage. Once again, a firm mildly annoying grip on the child's arm, just above the bicep, accompanied by the repeated verbal warning. My wife realizing my annoyance with the chaos at hand, quickly informed me that if I did things my way, two things would happen. One, the kids would behave themselves and have a good time. And two, we would be sued out of our current lifestyle.

So my always quick on her feet spouse employed tactics she knew to be legal in the current environment. She immediately put the two twins, and a few others in “timeout”. That worked for about three seconds until one of them decided he didn't want to be in “time out” anymore, and hit her in the head with a “Jesus Is With Me” book. Being a relatively small children's book, she recovered quickly, and put him back into “timeout”. Soon the other children began to smell our fear, and began a cycle of violence reminiscent of something you would expect to see in a toddler sized African country.

For the rest of the night we used stalling tactics like bribery, movies, snacks and so forth until we were through with our three hours of hell. Parents started rolling in to pick up their little angels, and I took special interest in noticing the fathers of the perps, as in my twisted view of things, these are the responsible parties in the discipline of children(especially boys). Most parents were oblivious, took their kids and left, but a few actually did ask, “How was he?”, or “Did he behave himself?”. Being a generally blunt, outspoken person who didn't know these people from Adam and after this night would never see them again, my answers ranged from, “terrible”, “I've never seen worse behavior in my life”, to “Your daughter may need stitches”, and “I wouldn't give your kids real silverware, ever.” I then went home to clean rags and a bottle of bourbon to assess the damage.

So when Tony Blair comes out and says, “I smacked my kids”, more power to him. I only wish he were there with me that fateful evening in July.

-knowseverything

[SittinYonder]

That is a funny story. I won't do the nursery at our church, although my wife does from time-to-time.

a couple of recently adopted Russian kids who apparently wanted to do nothing but sit in the corner and stab plastic fruit with little toy knives from the kitchen set

We have a friend from Russia who moved here a few years ago. When she first came over here she was enamored with all the fruit available at the grocery store. She'd never seen anything like it in Russia.