This year I took Scarlette to her first ever Easter egg hunt. She was getting a bit tired after all of the festivities so while her older cousins were off doing some of the events for big kids, I took her down to the toddler playground. She had never sat in an open swing before and was having a ton of fun practicing pumping her legs. After a good ten minutes of pushing her, I snapped these two pictures on my cell phone to send to my husband who was stuck in the office over the weekend.
I went back to pushing her on the swing with one hand while texting the photos to J with the other when apparently I got a little overzealous and PUSHED MY DAUGHTER OUT OF THE SWING.
That’s right. I pushed my two year old daughter out of the swing, where she landed face first in the dirt.
GIVE ME ALL THE PARENTING AWARDS.
I didn’t even realize that she was falling until I heard a collective gasp from the playground benches where a group of parents were gathered. I looked up to see one woman raise her eyebrows and another a hand to her mouth and Scarlette hitting the ground all at the exact same moment.
This is the sort of thing that people write entire blog posts about which end up going viral on the internet, y’all.
I brushed Scarlette off and she looked at the swing, tilted her head, and then marched over to the swing next to it as though it were the fault of that particular swing that she faceplanted and not her mothers.
My child has a lot of grace for me.
I gave her a (much gentler) push and then addressed the gawkers on the bench because I find that it’s best to just call out all the awkwardness of a situation “So, obviously I just had a stellar parenting moment, I told them, I hope you’re all bloggers because that little spectacle you just witnessed has the potential to make you totally famous on the internet. You can totally write the next ‘Dear Mom On Her iPhone’ post.”
Weirdly enough, I didn’t leave the egg hunt with any new friends.
(I’m being facetious. They were are all very gracious post initial judginess, although sadly, none of them were bloggers or had any idea what I was talking about. No one understands me, internet!)
(I know, the awkward watermarking. If people didn’t steal photos and pass them off as their own kids with a fake story to raise money on the internet, I wouldn’t need to do that.)
