Boys in play houses should not throw stones

Scott and I were moving at a good clip last Thursday as we left work. We had to pick up the boys, stop home to change, and get to Waupaca ASAP to meet Scott's parents, who were going to take Will to the lake house and camping.

We had a plan and it was working. As I ran upstairs to get the baby's stuff, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that one of my friends from work was getting a "talking-to" about her son.

Please not today, please don't be in trouble today, I thought.

As I came back down the stairs, however, I noticed Will staring at his feet and looking like a whipped pup. The daycare director and Scott were standing nearby, arms crossed.

"Do you want to tell your mom and dad what happened?"

Will, suddenly paralyzed and struck mute, did not want to tell us what happened.

Apparently, our son has joined a gang. And this rock-throwing gang decided it would be a good idea to throw shovels full of rocks at two of the teachers' cars.

Scott has a good sense of timing and is pretty good at finding the right words to say in awkward situations. He wasn't quite on his game that day, however.

"Soooo, Will's not going to be here tomorrow."

Will, who never really had a great sense of timing, quickly perked up and said, "Yeah! I'm going swimming and we're going to have a fire and s'mores and going camping!"

AWK-WARD.

Yes, we probably should have told Will, "Oh, no you're not. You'll never eat another s'more as long as you live!"

But, we didn't. He got to go to the lake for the weekend, he even got to have s'mores. And, as we drove home from Waupaca that night, where Will actually got pizza and ice cream on the day of his biggest behavioral transgression ever, we wondered if we'd played this right.

Will did receive an adequate amount of discussion about "good choices" and "just walking away" when his friends are making bad choices. He also lost quite a few toys and had to run through "saying sorry" role-playing and he made some apology notes for his teachers. Basically, he eventually did make amends in all the ways a four-year-old can. But, good parenting would dictate that we should have acted immediately. Instead, we were thinking about our own plans and Will's grandparents' plans.

And, as we reflected on the day's events last Thursday, we decided that we'd just live and learn ... the good/bad news, we figured, is that he'll probably screw up again and give us another chance.

We just didn't figure he'd screw up again on his first day back at daycare.

Last night, he tells me, "Mommy, the boys were throwing rocks again."

"Really?" I said. "Did you throw rocks too?"

"Yup," he said. "But, this time, after I threw the rocks, I just walked away."

That's really not what we meant, Will ...