Plight Of The At Home Dad

So I pulled into my son Cole's playschool parking lot this morning and it looked surprisingly empty.

He only goes Monday, Thursday and Friday from 9am to 1pm (so I tend to really look forward to those mornings).

I spent the better part of the morning listening to him cry and whine about how he didn't want to got to school... only to get to school and find out that it was a TEACHER WORK DAY!

Now, I came home and saw that it was clearly marked on the calendar. But Monday my wife works late so I took the boys to hang out with another couple with kids and had dinner. Tuesday night I had band practice and last night I had to work a catering gig (pre-game cocktail party at UNC's business school prior to tip off for the UNC/NC State game) only to find that my free morning had disappeared.

And I have to say I think that if I was a mom, I would have had a least two to three calls from other moms in my son's class setting up play dates for the teacher work day, especially since we're experiencing record temps here in the Carolinas this week (yesterday it was in the 70s!).

Which brings me to yesterday: Weather was warm and I suggested to my son that we go to the park. Bored of the park we usually go to, he suggested the "yellow" park which is the park in this faux village community called Meadowmont that he knows about because we went to the pool there last summer.

We get to the park and thee is one mom with an infant strapped to her chest and another child with long curly read hair (held in barrettes) and they are having a picnic of sorts ON THE PLAY STRUCTURE. Another group shows up comprised of two moms each with infants slash toddlers who appear to be sisters and with their mother (i.e. grandma).

Then me and my son.

The moms immediately interact with each other with "grandma" starting off the AHD smack down when she asked the redheaded woman if my son belongs to her. My son has brown hair and blue eyes and, ahem, looks just like me! The redheaded mom (now officially referred to as "hippy mom") said "no" while one of the sister moms sort of gave me that "sorry my mom's a kook" look.

Grandma and her daughters decided to have a picnic themselves ON THE PLAY STRUCTURE and - possibly realizing how rude this was - asked the hippy mom if her kids would care to join them.

It was like I didn't even exist.

Shortly thereafter, I noticed hippy mom standing over by the tree line watching her daughter go pee. I was duly impressed that she had taught her daughter to stand up and pee until I realized that her daughter was a boy. He ended up peeing on his pants by virtue of letting them land on the ground where he had just peed. Did hippy mom changed his pants? No. He spent the rest of the time there swinging on swings and sliding on slides with pee-stained sweat pants.

Now I can sorta roll with that - you got caught unprepared but it was a nice day and figured it would dry out quickly. But what I couldn't understand was putting barrettes in your boy's hair. Fine, let your kid grow his hair long, but don't make the boy look like a girl. Grandma added insult when she made some comment about being "an older sister" to which hippy mom replied "brother."

Hippy mom left a short while later (after her son ran around screaming in my son's face acting like some monster; I wanted my son to break out a wrestling move on him as he clearly had the size advantage but he proved even wiser by just saying, "Stop, I don't like that,").

Then, as I'm helping my son cross the monkey bars I heard grandma shriek, "Where's my purse?" and I saw that her purse was by the monkey bars. One of her daughter's pointed to the monkey bars and said "over there."

Grandma got up, walked over, picked up her purse and put it down by her side.

So in one trip to the park I got vibed as a pedophile, excommunicated from parental conversation and insinuated I was a thief.

And now today I got blindsided by the teacher work day and wonder if there's a play date with several moms' of my son's classmates going on at some park somewhere.