idk what it is about kids these days that makes them so funny but in any case my friend just told us about how her younger sister babysits for a 7 and 9 yr old and one day they said they wanted to play “bus drivers” and they made wheels and everything but then the game was just being bus drivers at a union meeting discussing their problems
Children love tormenting me. I am a very tormentable adult.
I just spent the last half hour talking to four children who kept asking if I was 79 years old, if I had ever been attacked by pirates, if I had ever gotten married to a pirate, if I’d ever been eaten by a dinosaur, if I knew that I was a big ugly green alien, and if they could turn me into “a whoopie deflated cushion”. And then they competed to see who could scream it the loudest.
clarification: I’m not complaining, this is affectionate tormenting from children who enjoy my presence, not children trying to make me unhappy
I can’t do justice to one of the weirdest camp stories I know. My friend tells it so well, and I can offer only a pale shadow of his story.
Last summer, he was working with one of the younger units comprised of ten year old boys. They had spent the night camping on another beach and were just readying themselves to depart. “Make sure you have all your things!” called my friend. “Don’t leave anything behind!”
One small boy came up, dragging a massive tangle of decomposing seaweed behind him. “But… what about me boy?” he asked, lip trembling.
“…what is ‘me boy’?”
The child held up the stinking wad of bull kelp. “This is him. This is Me Boy.”
“Me Boy is not coming back with us,” said his counselor. “You’re going to leave Me Boy behind on the beach where he belongs.”
The campers loudly mourned the loss of Me Boy. They insisted on giving him a Viking burial at sea, which just consisted of pushing him solemnly off the back of the rowboat into the water and watching him drift away in the surf.
That was only the beginning. Me Boy would be back.
The campers, in true camp fashion, possessed some kind of cultic hive-mind and a predisposition for bizarre memes. Me Boy would not be forgotten. They started telling each other stories about Me Boy and how he would one day rise again. There were warring factions with contradicting dogmas about Me Boy. Only when the gardener allowed them to take home a zucchini she had harvested did they find their god, born anew.
Me Boy, The Zucchini That Was A God, became the whole unit’s mascot. The kids would bicker over who got to carry him. They built nests and carriers for Me Boy and brought him to different activities, fiercely defending him from those that would do him harm. One child appointed himself the Voice of Me Boy and would translate the zucchini’s divine wishes into human speech.
It got out of hand. Me Boy had become a distraction, a fixation, a violent controversy. Something had to be done.
My friend, their counselor, took it upon himself to kill Me Boy. The children wailed in despair as he chopped their God into refreshing slices. With this sudden turn of fortune, followers of Me Boy turned to theophagy. “We must eat him to preserve his power!” they cried. Boys who would otherwise never have touched a vegetable ate greedily of this sacrament, eager to let Me Boy live on within them.
For a time, it seemed that peace and order had been restored, and the religion had already faded into its silver age. But only for a time.
In the last few days of camp, the religion of Me Boy splintered into several denominations. Every meal yielded new vegetable matter said to be a reincarnation of Me Boy, only for opposing groups to dismiss these as false prophets. Some believed that Me Boy was gone. Others believed his spirit lived on, intangible, omnipresent. Some believed he had found a new vessel inside a carrot, a pear, a slice of cantaloupe… even inside a child. There was chaos, and strife, and heartbreak without the guidance of Me Boy.
Yesterday at work these two 12yo boys came through my line and i’m instantly like. oh Boy. Because solo children at a grocery store are always forces of chaos, good or bad
But thankfully these ones were totally pleasant, and when i asked if they wanted a receipt one of them pulled out a random fuckin receipt from his bag and asked “Do YOU???” and y’all, i lost my shit… What a power move. When will i ever be this funny
my relationship w faith and religion has always been so funny. when i did my first communion i got given a lil wooden box w the virgin mary on it so i did what every good catholic does and filled it w tiny glow in the dark spiders
No. You remove your child from the scene (because children are often reacting to overstimulation such as the grocery store is too loud, the room is too bright, there’s people they don’t know around, they’ve been there too long etc) and go somewhere quiet. You then sit with them as they cry, reassuring them that you are present, and once they have stopped crying you offer comfort and ask if they know what it is that they were so upset about. Then you calmly talk to them so they – and you – can understand and fix the problem that was the root of the tantrum.
Bad example;
‘Why are you crying?’
‘I’m hungry’
‘Well we’re going home soon!’
Good example;
‘Do you know why you were crying?’
‘I’m hungry’
‘We’re at the grocery store to get food. We only have three more aisles to go. We can count them down together. Then we’ll go home and we can eat.’
Children don’t understand ‘soon’; even for adults, ‘soon’ is a relative term. children understand things like ‘three aisles. Two. One. Now we’re going home!’
Children need communication, understanding and teaching. Not beating, intimidating or belittling.
Get therapy.
“hm, my child is upset and being loud about it, I should hit my child to make them stop being loud”
i love being a camp counselor…obvi t posing is big rn so we use it as a quiet call and u havent LIVED until youve seen 100 children t posing absolutely silently in a field
i taught an 8 yr old in my swim class how to do a backfloat by saying “remember to t pose!!” and she got it
Eating dinner with a friend and her very sleepy two year old, I give the kid her plate of veggies and say ‘okay it’s hot so we’ll have to blow it,’ kid blows on her dinner then absently says ‘happy birthday’ to her broccoli
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