Rage against the 4year old!

There are few things in the world that can bring out the really ugly, really withering face of disappointment in me but if I had to list them they would be: eating with your mouth open/chewing gum with the contents of your gob on display/picking at scabs or flaps of skin/being a general idiot. One of them is also when parents use months as way to measure their child’s age when they’re a toddler. Peanut is a year and a half – or 18 months if you must. Anything past 18 months I think should be measured as a year plus; its not the worst thing a person can say by any means, most people I know tell me their kids age in months but when they start saying ‘oh he’s 24 months now…’ I can’t help but say ‘don’t you mean 2?’ I know that it’s a way of telling yourself that your child is still a baby; I call Peanut my baby at home all the time but the fact is that she’s a toddler, a little girl and she should be treated like one.

So at a party a couple of weeks ago it would appear that all of that went out of the window as I scooped Peanut up off the floor in a fit of anger. At this party she was one of just a few little kids and a huge mountain of toys. Naturally, like any child she made a beeline for the toys but was greeted by a barrage of pink nastiness from a group of girls no older than 4 years old. I didn’t think it was possible to hate a child but it would appear that actually, you can. Any toy that Peanut touched was promptly snatched from her hands followed by a ‘get off, that’s not yours!’ You have to leave them to it when its not your own child and hope that their own mother tells them off, but when it happens on more than one occasion I think it’s a given that you’ve got the right to step in. So I did.

Rage!!!

I felt like Maleficent pounding over to them in my swishy silk dress and heels and as I scooped up a pretty yet visibly confused and upset Peanut, the face came out. ‘Don’t you shout at her, she’s just a baby!’ A few heads turned including the mother of said girls but surprisingly nobody said a thing, which is probably a good thing as I’d hate to cause a scene – a Christening isn’t the best place to kick off! Walking off with her in my arms she was trying to wriggle out and go back to the toys but I felt like she was very much a baby among the grown-up girls and started to wonder how it would have been if she was old enough to snatch back. Well, that stage has arrived but just a little too late. Peanut is going through the ‘mine, mine, mine’ stage now – this would have been useful at the party and I definitely wouldn’t have told her off for it either, I wonder if the other mother would have stepped in though?

Tweet