I'll trade you...

...six play cars for a little bit of advice. "Grow a backbone, lady."

Okay, that's not what I really said, but it's what I said in my mind as I was patiently waiting to pay at a garage sale this weekend. {On a side note, garage sales are really growing on me!}

Let me explain the wonderful bit of advice that was floating around in my head...
As Jack and I were wandering around garage sales this weekend, we spotted one that had a lot of kids stuff. Jackpot! So we headed up the drive. All the while, I hear whining and fussing that is getting louder as we approach. And because the sun was quite bright and my eyes are really bad, I couldn't see into the garage to know what was going on. Once we were up the drive, the source of screaming and whining was an approximately 8-9 year old girl and her mother.

At the time, we were the only "customers." This girl was carrying on about how she wanted her daddy, how it wasn't fair, and her mother just kept feeding into her whining with little comments that were fueling the fire. The girl's whining was quite annoying and had Jack not spotted a table FULL of little cars (which he's totally into right now) and the cars not been 25 cents a piece, we would have been laying stroller rubber on the pavement to get out. But the play cars kept us there.

While choosing the cars we were going to purchase, a fight ensued among this woman's other three kids (some of them might have been neighbors kids), and she was chatting away on her phone oblivious to it all! We headed to where she was seated and stood there for what seemed like a long time (probably only a minute or so) while she yelled at the fighting bunch, argued more with the girl who was carrying on, and then pleaded with her to talk on the phone to grandma so she could help me. The woman eventually just got off the phone {ahem, obvious choice} so I could pay her the whopping $1.50 I owed for six cars. And when I did pay her, the conversation consisted of her saying "$1.50."

I understand it was just a garage sale, but I was very annoyed with how the oldest girl was allowed to act like a toddler and carry on. I thank my lucky stars that I was raised the way I was. I think it makes me a better parent. {Thanks, Mom and Dad.} Because there is NO way we were allowed to act like that. You straighten up or ship out. And I wanted to push the pause button on that whole situation and give that woman a bit of advice. **Send her inside until she can act her age. Let her throw the fit outside of the public eye. I bet she'll get over it a whole lot faster.**

The hard earned garage sale cars.

Whew... this is getting long. So, on that note, I don't want to claim that I know it all about parenting. Trust me, I don't. But I do know some things NOT to do. And what I don't know, I read here. I don't agree with everything that John Rosemond says, but most of it seems like common sense to me. Have any of you read John Rosemond in your local paper or online? If you haven't, I strongly recommend it. He may seem old school at times, but his underlying thoughts always seem to make sense to me.