GOSH!
It's only 10:40 and my heart's already fallen out twice today.
First, while driving, I noticed a teeny tiny little person up ahead on the sidewalk. Upon closer inspection, I saw that this was a boy not older than three. Where was his mother on this busy morning? Why, about three feet behind him...with her back to the road! Hello--I don't care that you look like you're wiping crumbs off your baby's stomach or back or doing what ever it is you think you need to do--you either wait until your son's bus picks him up, or have him stand on the lawn (where you are) and you stand on the sidewalk (where he is).
Then, on my way home, I was turning a bend and at the top was a woman waiting to cross the street with her baby. Why would this make my heart stop? Oh, just because she was standing on the sidewalk with her stroller in the street!!! Notice that I mentioned I was coming around a bend--how the spindleshanks are people expected to see just a stroller in the street when they're coming up a hill that curves? No, moronic mother, we don't know that you're standing there with your baby asking to have it killed.
How seriously stupid can people BE?
Once while driving Miryam home after Shabbos, I turned the corner and went up the block, and there was a group of little Chassidish boys on a shul lawn in their black suits/pants and they were impossible to see. I probably only saw them cause I have a crazy intense baby-radar. Anyway, they were playing almost right up to the curb. As we came to them, I rolled down Miryam's window and told them that they were hard to see and should probably move closer to the shul than to the street. They all got up, thanked me (a million and a half times--even as I was driving away) and moved. But they were between 5 and 11. They weren't 3, they weren't infants, and they weren't mothers.
As Napoleon would say, "IDIOT!"
First, while driving, I noticed a teeny tiny little person up ahead on the sidewalk. Upon closer inspection, I saw that this was a boy not older than three. Where was his mother on this busy morning? Why, about three feet behind him...with her back to the road! Hello--I don't care that you look like you're wiping crumbs off your baby's stomach or back or doing what ever it is you think you need to do--you either wait until your son's bus picks him up, or have him stand on the lawn (where you are) and you stand on the sidewalk (where he is).
Then, on my way home, I was turning a bend and at the top was a woman waiting to cross the street with her baby. Why would this make my heart stop? Oh, just because she was standing on the sidewalk with her stroller in the street!!! Notice that I mentioned I was coming around a bend--how the spindleshanks are people expected to see just a stroller in the street when they're coming up a hill that curves? No, moronic mother, we don't know that you're standing there with your baby asking to have it killed.
How seriously stupid can people BE?
Once while driving Miryam home after Shabbos, I turned the corner and went up the block, and there was a group of little Chassidish boys on a shul lawn in their black suits/pants and they were impossible to see. I probably only saw them cause I have a crazy intense baby-radar. Anyway, they were playing almost right up to the curb. As we came to them, I rolled down Miryam's window and told them that they were hard to see and should probably move closer to the shul than to the street. They all got up, thanked me (a million and a half times--even as I was driving away) and moved. But they were between 5 and 11. They weren't 3, they weren't infants, and they weren't mothers.
As Napoleon would say, "IDIOT!"
posted by BrownsvilleGirl at 10:38 AM
Dina, have you ever read Portnoy's Complaint? I mean, not that I would necessarily recommend such gleefully sexually explicit book to an O-girl such as yourself, but it might not hurt to read a book whose main idea is that uber-protective ultra-smothering Jewish mothers, the kind who hover around their children making sure they do not approach the sidewalk (much less the street), sometimes wind up with extremely maladjusted nice Jewish sons who spend their teenage years compulsively masturbating and their adult years in a vain search for ever more degrading sexual non-fulfillment. ;-)
Okay, so I'm at least half-kidding. But honestly. Telling kids not playing in the street that they should play even further from the street is...like...overdoing it. And 11 year olds are definitely old enough to play outside without their mothers breathing down their neck, and probably responsible enough to keep on eye on younger kids too. Hell, I was babysitting when I was 11 and those kids, to my knowledge, as still alive.
And if seeing children outside on their own sends you into a panic, you probably shouldn't move to Israel. Here kids go to school all by themselves from elementary school onwards, and they seem to handle it alright.
You got to give de chilluns a likkle bit of trust, Miss Dina. Not every child is constantly conspiring to make a bodily leap off the sidewalk into oncoming traffic the minute his mother's back is turned. I promise. If children were really that prone to dying, there probably wouldn't be 7 billion people in the world.
Dearest Michael,
I have to ask you when the last time you drove during the pitch black night was. Children playing a foot from the street in the middle of the night is like they're playing in the middle of the street. It's the same thing when they're clad in black and it's close to 11pm. Secondly, I don't think you quite grasp the concept of what a child is. You can never ever ever find something that might be equal to or close to equal in value to a child.
You sound like a parent who justifies leaving their child in the car with the windows up on a hot, summer day while they run around the corner "just to pick up food." You wouldn't take a risk with a bag of diamonds or a million dollars, you don't take chances with your kids.
"You give them enough rope, and they'll hang themselves."
Yeah.
I belive dina is talking about 3 year olds and babies, not 11 year olds. i mean, her own brother plays ball in the streest with his frweinds and moves to the side when a car appraoches. however, the moms in thsi story either put a baby carriage IN THE BLIND SPOT of a street or left a 3-year-old, who is nto easy to see and may wander accidentally into the strret or whatnot, too close to a busy road without keepinf an eye on him. That can be scary, especially during rush hour on narrow, windy Monsey roads. If you would see the places these children were standing/put, yopu wopuld better understand where she is coming from
and that was me, sorry.