Parenting..a whole new world of pet peeves

Parenting brings about a whole new world of annoyances and pet peeves and dealings with totally rude people. I am okay with yelling and screaming at bad drivers while I am in my car but I don't usually have face to face confrontations with parents but today that *almost* changed. I am amazingly surprised that I did not go and have a cow with this mom.

Andrew and I are at the park. I am about 15 feet away talking with my friend. I see him hop onto a dinosaur ride on thing. It's his favorite thing in the whole park. There is a mom and an another child lingering by and the other child is quite younger than Andrew...barely walking kid. Anyway, Andrew is on the dinosaur thing for about a minute when this other mom takes MY child off the dinosaur thing and helps her kid on. Her kid was already half way on the back seat. I was dumbfounded and just talked to my friend about how rude that was. But after the whole incident, I finally decided to give her the benefit of the doubt that maybe my child was saying "off off" or "out out" and she thought she needed to help him. Andrew NEVER wants to get off the dinosaur but I suppose it is possible that he didn't want to share it with the other kid so I guess all in all I am glad I didn't go psycho on her.

In other news, he was in the sand box and some 3 year old wraps his arm around his legs and brings him down. Mom no where to be seen but I understand that because at this particular play ground, it is all fenced in and you don't have to watch your kid every second. I watch Andrew to see if he is going to go ballistic and he does start crying but only because he got his hands dirty with the sand and Andrew does not like getting dirty. He sees the kid later when he is getting off the dinosaur and he kicks the kid square in the chest. I suppress my grin as I apologize to the mom. The mom said "It's okay. That's what I call a dose of his own medicine". Definitely a mom I could get along with.

Ahhh the joys of the playground.