Mama Bear

I am not especially protective of my kid. I'm just not.

But last night Mama Bear came out.

We were at a water park for a company party. Truthfully, we only decided to go because we thought it would be fun for Ike. I knew I wouldn't be able to do most of the slides in my pregnant state, and I knew it would be fairly crowded, and I knew that we'd have to drive for a bit to get there. We were really and truly going for the child.

We went into a children's area, and Eric assisted Ike up some steps and under some waterfalls, (Ike was NOT a fan) so he could go down the slide. I waited at the bottom to catch him. I was worried that he might not like being splashed as he went down the slide, and that was something that was pretty much inevitable. (It was a slide with a cover over it and water running down the slide into the pool.) A few kids came down the slide, and then right as Eric was about to send Ike down, a little kid, probably about 4 years old, started climbing up the slide. I told him that he needed to wait because a baby was about to come down. Either he didn't hear me or he didn't listen. I didn't want to just yank him out of slide since I didn't know him at all, and I figured that when he started climbing up, he'd see that Ike was about to come down, and he'd skedaddle out of the way.

But that's not what happened. Ike came down the slide and plowed into this kid. He was very distraught, and I picked him up to comfort him. Right as I did that, the kid started to climb up the slide again. Enter Mama Bear.

I grabbed him by the shoulder, pulled him out and shouted, "You DO NOT climb up the slide! YOU JUST HURT A BABY!"

The child ran away. My heart was racing, and I said to the lady standing next to me, "I've never shouted at another person's child before." She said, "Oh, I figured he was yours." I replied, "No, if he'd been mine, I wouldn't have let him climb up in the first place."

I am just a little tempted to send an email out to everyone in my company (over 1,000 employees) saying, "If you attended the summer party and your small child said that a crazy lady yelled at him, it was me. And he deserved it."