Laugh or Cry?

I was forced to bring my two kids with me to Hobby Lobby to buy two yards of ribbon. That's all I needed. $1.68 worth of ribbon. I thought I could do it without any major incidents. I thought wrong.

We ran inside and I threw my 5 year old and 2 year old in a teeny tiny cart and began to wheel them toward the back of the store. My son thought it was lots of fun to grab at everything that came into his reach. Mind you I'm 35 weeks pregnant and trying to bend over to retrieve those items is next to impossible. After making it to the sewing center and finding my ribbon, I thought we were going to be out of there. That's when my stomach turned on me.

I've had some digestive trouble lately and I felt a churning in my stomach. I decided I was trapped and bolted toward the bathroom. Little did I know that Hobby Lobby has teeny tiny bathroom stalls as well as carts. I somehow wedged myself, extremely pregnant, and my two kids into the stall. The kids were leaning on my lap because there was no room. There were at least two other people in the bathroom to listen to my kids give the play by play of everything I was doing. I heard some chuckles from them outside the stall as my kids asked ridiculous questions about every noise they heard.

I felt myself get hot and my face turn red. I wished myself to be anywhere else but where I was. That was a classic "nanny deprived" moment. It was one of those pivital moments where you can choose to cry or laugh. I did a little of both and pulled myself together.

We got out of the bathroom and paid for my $1.68 ribbon and left. I've never been so happy to get in my car, turn up the kids movie on the DVD player and just have three minutes to myself.

Why Parents Cry at Kindergarten?

I never thought of myself as a overly emotional person. Sometimes I'll catch a little tear fall when my kids do something great like finish a race in swimming, score a goal at soccer or shoot their first basket. But for some reason, the second I drove away from my daughter's first day of Kindergarten drop off, I was bawling. It was a full out sniffling, snorting, sob. My husband was in the car and I hate crying in front of him so I was trying to muffle it which only made it all worse.

Why did I do that? What made me so emotional? My daughter had been going to preschool since she was 3 and I had never reacted like that. What is so special about Kindergarten? Maybe it was how little she looked walking into that big school. Maybe I was feeling all the anticipation she was feeling and wanted to go through it for her. I don't know if it was the thought that she wasn't little anymore or that I no longer had a preschool child. Whatever caused that emotion was powerful and scary. I still haven't figured it out.