A Dose of Humor – And He’s S’posed to be the Gentle One.

5 Minutes for Parenting’s weekly column, A Dose of Humor, is here to remind you to take your humor pill regularly as the best medicine to treat the side effects of parenting! It features a different blogger every week and is hosted by Rachel at Grasping for Objectivity in My Subjective Life. Now you can also join in by linking in your funniest moment of the week, using the Mr. Linky at the bottom of this post!!

Jo wears many hats, because cold and bad hair days abound, and because she’s a Mom to a four year old and a two year old. She recently left her paying job (the one with the perks of drinking coffee while it’s still hot and going to the bathroom in unattended peace) to focus on her more pressing career aspirations including, but not limited to: Personal (potty) Trainer, Professor of Philosophy (seeking to answer the age-old question of “why”), Executive Chef (they’d fire her if she wasn’t working for free), and Media Consultant (would you like Blues Clues or Sesame Street?). In her abundant free time, she blogs at Mylestones about her family’s memorable moments.

Let me start by saying that Caed is not my problem child. He is not the child who was bitten at nursery school three times in the past two weeks, and he is not the child who totally had it coming (i.e. body checking various infants and toddlers who dared make a play for the Little Tykes slide). Sure, on occasion, he has been known to feign violence in order to protect his little sister, but all in all, he’s the gentle one.

So when I picked him up after Sunday school this past week, it didn’t even occur to me ask his teacher how he did. He always does great. He’s wonderful. Such a good listener. Such a kind spirit.

After collecting my model citizen, I loitered outside the classroom for a few minutes, catching up with another mom while the kids hunted for their outerwear. I can always count on a missing jacket, hat, mitten or boot to buy me some chat time with the other grown-ups. It’s one of the perks of living within driving distance of the Arctic.

Before the last mitten was located, my friend (who doubled as Caed’s teacher that morning) joined the conversation. As she turned toward me, I noticed a whopping shiner underneath her right eye that seemed to be growing puffier by the second, framed by symmetrical red scrapes that might be attributed to a visit from Zorro’s mini-me.

“Oh my, what happened?” I exclaimed, ready to insert a cheeky comment about Fight Club, and how maybe she couldn’t talk about it.

“Caed…”
(my jaw started to drop)
“hit…”
(my mouth now wide open)
“me…”
(my eyes covered in horror).

Thankfully, there was more to the sentence,
“…with a toy. It was completely an accident. He was so sweet and apologetic. It’s really okay.”

Caed was standing near me now, and overheard my friend explaining the mishap. My sense of relief that he had not purposely smacked around his Sunday school teacher was short-lived, as he quickly piped in, “Yes, it was an accident, but guess what, I can knock my Daddy out FOR REAL. And Mommy can beat Daddy too.”

He neglected to mention that he was talking about Wii boxing.

Thankfully, my friends are full of grace and haven’t yet disavowed me on the grounds that I birthed a child with a brow-raising enthusiasm for beating up grown-ups.

This post was originally published on January 15, 2009 at Mylestones.

If you would like to be considered to be featured in A Dose of Humor, email Rachel at doseofhumor (at) gmail (dot) com.

Join us and link up your funniest moment of the week here!!!