Originally published at American Family. Please leave any comments there.

I have not actually fallen off the face of the earth, rather I am hibernating.   The introvert that I try to subvert has succombed to the intense socializing of the last week.  Two birthday parties, three Chinese new year celebrations, and one long visit with a virtual stranger have pretty much wiped me out.  I intend to post a few more pictures from the last two days, but not tonight.

I am facing a bit of a dilemma though.  At M’s (second) birthday party, two of the attendees made nasty comments directed at L (My sweet innocent baby!!).  They called her “that disgusting baby” and said “we HATE yucky disgusting babies like THAT” and gave her dirty looks repeatedly.  Apparently, this was instigated because L tried unsuccesfully to take an abandoned cupcake off of one of their plates.

Their parents were not supervising them at this time, but another parent over heard them and told them it wasn’t good manners to talk like that.  Then the kids lowered their voices and continued to say mean things about L and give dirty looks to the parent who corrected their manners.  (I wasn’t there and the story was related to me later.)

L was completely oblivious to the commentary.  Obviously, I don’t think it was harmful to her at all, nor do I hold any hard feelings.  Little kids do stuff like this all the time.

The question i am struggling with is whether or not I should mention anything to the parents.  If M or L were being mean/rude like that, I would want someone to tell me so I could talk to her about it.  I am also glad when other adults remind my children that they need to behave when I am not in the immediate vacinity.  And I want my kids to know they should behave respectfully when adults correct them.

At the same time, I do recognize that other parents are not always so eager to hear not-good things about their children,  no matter what the intention of the tattletale may be.  And also, they may not approve of other adults correcting their kids.

I was contemplating sending a short, friendly email  to the parents in question. (Hi! It’s me! Just a heads up that this happened and you might want to know!! No big deal!) 

Or maybe I should just mind my own business?

Minding my own business has never been my strong suit and I keep thinking I would want someone to tell ME if my kids did something similar. 

Your thoughts and suggestions would be much appreciated.

Originally published at American Family. Please leave any comments there.

Thanks for all the input. 

The thing that put me over the top on the decision to contact the other mom was when That Patti  (who reads this blog) said they had made a similar comment (”disgusting”) about her son who is missing a hand.   While kids will be kids, that kind of thing definitely needs to be addressed, in my opinion. 

(And just to be clear,  I don’t think they are bad kids at all.  If they were, I wouldn’t even bother to talk to their mom.  I would just keep my kids away.)

It ended up that I had a perfect opportunity to email the parent because one of the other kids at M’s party was just diagnosed with pink eye.   When I emailed all the parents to let them know, I just threw in a short note at the bottom to the mom of the kids I wrote about before.

It all turned out just peachy keen.  I emailed the other mom and told her what happened.  She thanked me, told me she was glad another parent said something to them and said she would talk to them herself. 

This is exactly how I hope I would have reacted myself. 

Now, my only concern is that we didn’t spread pinkeye to half the city when I had the kids play Pin the Paw on Blue with a blindfold. Heh.