In the face!

Remember this?

Barring any kind of life threatening or injury related topics, what is the last text message regarding your kids you’d want to receive as you are walking out of 8 a.m. meeting?

Go ahead give it a couple seconds of thought.

Would one that said your 2nd grader punched the next door neighbor in the face right before leaving for the bus stop?

Evidently we had an incident on Tuesday morning between Bailey and our next door neighbor. Every morning our neighbor, who is in 3rd grade, comes over and walks with our girls to the bus stop. On every morning except for Friday’s, Kinsey is the oldest. Which means we’ve put a 4th grader in charge of getting a 3rd grader and a 2nd grader out the door with all required outerwear and backpacks and to the bus stop on time. Risky? Sure, but so was hiring Mike Tomlin to replace Bill Cowher. They’ve done a pretty good job of getting themselves ready and to the bus stop all year. But I’ve been home for that most of the time through Christmas. However, with work picking up, they are going to be home by themselves a lot more when its time to leave the house.

So a face punch incident isn’t a real promising start.

After gathering evidence and conducting interviews, we learned that our neighbor was playing with Bailey’s hair. Bailey mistook that for hair pulling or hitting or something nefarious. Her response? She went all Carl Racki in Youngblood. Which led to the aforementioned text message from our neighbor’s Dad who noticed his daughter holding an ice pack on her cheek as they walked to the bus stop.

At some point Bailey’s innate tendency to stand her ground will lead to good results. She doesn’t like being taken advantage of and that outlook will also probably allow her to succeed in certain things as she gets older. I’ve never seen her fail to stand up for herself. This is not something I want to coach out of her. When she’s 12 and a mean 6th grade girl decides to focus some negative energy on Bailey, I’m going to be pretty confident that she’ll react to bullying the way John Rambo reacted to Soviet military advisors in Vietnam. When she’s 16 and able to deliver a jab, cross, upper cut combination to a teenage boy who oversteps his bounds, I’m going to feel like I’m succeeding as a parent.

But she’s in 2nd grade. So at this point, it all pretty much comes across as an unruly, stubborn, impulsive 8 year old who doesn’t listen and has absolutely no sense of patience, forethought or self-control. Which of course means we get text messages from neighbors and emails from teachers talking about face punches and the number of times Bails gets sent to the hallway for interrupting the teacher.

So I’m going to go ahead just say that we’re “channeling” her energies into positive outcomes in the future. Its either that or admitting we suck at this parenting thing…