Ranting in the evening sun

The sunniest, warmest day we've had for a bit, and we did spend some of it playing outdoors, but we also spent a few hours of it in a softplay centre. All four of us went and met up with our friend Susan and her little girl Sophie.

The girls had a wonderful time until a bruiser of a girl about Grace's age violently pulled Gracie off a ride-on toy and started to drag her across the floor by her hair. Hubby spotted this and stopped it. This same girl had already purposely tried to crush a little baby boy with a piece of soft play equipment and would have succeeded if we hadn't stepped in, as his Mum had her back turned and hadn't noticed.

So after the incident with Grace, Hubby told the bruiser's Mum what had happened and she basically told him that she'd deal with it and that she didn't appreciate him stepping in at all. The Mum of the little boy who had almost been crushed shrank back and told me that Hubby was braver than she - I think it is awful that society has come to a point when parents are scared to tell another parent when their kid has hurt your kid, or when it is frowned upon to tell someone else's kid to stop hurting another person's kid or your own.

The mum didn't deal with it, of course. She just continued to sit on the sofa chatting to her Mum friends and giving us dirty looks. Luckily this happened just before we were due to leave anyway, but it did marr an otherwise really great day.

I'm not pretending we're the greatest parents ever - we make plenty mistakes - but I'd like to think we do the best we can by our kids most the time. If Grace does something wrong, I would expect and hope that another parent would tell her to stop and would tell me about it. I'd be mortified and very apologetic to the other party and would make Grace apologise too. Wouldn't you?

ANYWAY... I seem to have ranted for far too long here, so will stop and go calm down over a plate of nachos.