Rooster was invited to a "teddy bear tea" birthday party today. She was really excited about seeing her friend again this summer. I was just happy that it wasn't over a hundred degrees, since this party mostly involved me having to stand outside in someone else's backyard for two hours. For a kid like Rooster who has numerous food allergies, most of them with a severe gastric reaction, I do not just drop her off at a party and go home. Besides, she's only six. It's reasonable to expect I'll be paranoid about her for a few more years.
We were the first ones there, which surprised me since we arrived a bit late. Normally, I am obsessive about being on time, if not early, but I had not realized that there was no parking on Birthday Boy's street, so I had to wait for a light, drive around a block or two, and try and figure out a safe place to stash the car. Upon arrival, I chatted with Birthday Boy's mother while the kidlets played a game.
It turns out that a friend of ours who recently moved to another town just had a rather severe issue with their new neighbors. Specifically, their next-door neighbor's dog attacked their little girl. This was the dog's first known attack and it was supposedly completely unprovoked and quite vicious. Not only that, but the dog was not current on its rabies shots, so they had to quarantine the dog before putting it down. (According to Birthday Boy's mother, the neighbors put the dog down even though they were not required to do so by law. They did not want a pet who would attack a child in such a brutal manner and without provocation. I personally believe this was the correct decision to make.)
Unfortunately, the side effect of having this conversation was that I spent the duration of the party trying to keep an eye on the two dogs that were running around with the kidlets. Since most of the other parents present were relatives who were used to Birthday Boy's cousins running around with their dogs, nobody batted an eyelash as kidlets and dogs ran amok. I, on the other hand, was a nervous wreck.
Just to up the ante on the level of paranoia, this was also a pool party. Rooster is dangerous around pools. A few years ago, the kidlets were invited to a hotel pool with a few relatives, including Pig and myself there. She slipped away from everybody and jumped in without anyone realizing where she was. She was struggling to keep her head above water when Pig finally fished her out. Thank God I had put her inflatable vest on before we all headed to the pool, or she might have been unconscious on the bottom before we even noticed she was missing. Since then, I have been extremely nervous taking her around any water that is not in a drinking cup.
Birthday Boy's pool was a decent size for an inflatable one and even the littlest of kidlets could stand with their heads out of the water without needing floatation devices. That made me feel a little bit safer, but not enough to sit down and try to relax while watching the kidlets in the pool. Rooster, naturally, loved every second she spent in the water. She was not brazenly trying to give me a heart attack with her in-pool shenanigans, but I did worry about her not knowing how to swim nonetheless. I am not sure whether I was more worried when Rooster was running around with the dogs or when she was tempting fate in the pool, but it was a couple of the longest hours of my life.
Overall, it was a delightful little party. The tea part of the afternoon was very fancy and the kidlets all seemed to enjoy their finger sandwiches, crackers with cheese, and lemonade and tea poured from fancy shmancy carafes into elegant glasses. The kidlets loved going into the pool and loved trying to pour the water out of the pool onto the grass even more. The dogs that had me so paranoid were probably the calmest mutts I have ever met. One was so docile that someone put a boa around her collar and a tutu around her abdomen and the dog just left them there. Those poor pups were squirted with water from water pistols in the hands of Birthday Boy's older and much more active cousins. Neither dog misbehaved at all from what I could tell. I cannot say the same for those male cousins.
I suppose that a normal person would realize that paranoia was unnecessary today and would relax a bit on any future events where either dogs or pools were involved. In case you haven't figured it out by now, I am not normal. I have every intention of worrying whenever my kidlets are around animals and water. But hey, what's a little paranoia between friends?
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