Bad Influence

Today was the spring concert at Noah's elementary school. When the last song ended Anke and I turned to each other "thank God that is over" one of said "what a nightmare" the other replied. The mother next to us turned and said "That was so sweet!" She was literally wiping tears from her eyes. Her reaction made me look at the kids other than Noah on whom my attention was fixed. I saw cute beaming little angles. What a different experience we had than most. Let me explain.

[Now we did have out teary eyed proud parent moment as well. There was a boy who was crying and Noah was reaching over and petting his arm and then holding his hand. So cute. Noah is really compassionate when he sees others upset.]

Looking into the future as a parent one of the worries one has are those bad influences. The kids who will pressure our sweet innocent ones to do things they otherwise would not do: steal things, try drugs, whatever.

Well that possible future is already reality for us, in kindergarten. Noah has the worst possible best friend and tonight it drove us crazy.

His best friend is a girl from his original class (at least now that he is in the Spanish program he is no longer in class with her). They love each other. When Noah and her see each other at school they run across the school yard and then Noah leaps through the air and Julia catches Noah and holds on to him while he straddles her. It is cute.

We already ended the play dates for them. Julia's mom's idea of a play date was to go to McDonald's for a hot fudge sundae and then go home and let the kids play video games. Neither of those things are things we chose to let Noah do. But we accepted that. Different parenting choices.

That wasn't the worst thing though. The worst was the fact that Noah thinks misbehaving is a cool way to get Julia's attention as she is constantly misbehaving as well. When she was at our house I would catch them with a hammer and a trail of destruction in their wake. Together they misbehave and Noah loves it.

So we put an end to play dates.

So tonight at the concert things were OK at first. Noah was on stage with his class and they were singing songs. Noah was being his goofy self and sticking his but out in funny poses and being extra silly with his hand gestures, but it was in the realm of acceptable behaviour - he was the one stand out goofy one but not too bad.

Meanwhile, Julia (who had performed the night before) was in the audience. Her mom sat watching Julia's brother in the performance while Julia and her sister ran freely around the room. They would come to the mom, make a ton of noise, run outside, pick flowers the parents planted, run back inside, jump up on the chairs, make more noise, they were being totally obnoxious and the mom never said one word to them, as if they were invisible.

Julia of course was watching Noah. At one point Noah's behaviour took a turn for the worse. Julia had gone up to the front and was teasing him and he was showing off to her by being extra goofy. Still not too bad.

The painful part came when Noah's class returned to their seats in the audience while other classes performed. Julia and her sister made the rounds of the room and outside, bringing Noah the flowers, so soon Noah had a lap full of freshly picked flowers from the rapidly deflowered garden out front.

Then came the last song. All the classes sang. Noah stood in the front. Julia ran up and actually stood between the teacher and Noah and Noah and her carried on as if they could care less a concert was happening. So basically between all the weeping parents and all the singing angles were Noah and Julia being rude little goofballs. The teacher at one point asked Julia to move. Never a word from her mom. (In retrospect we wished we had nicely asked Julia not to destract Noah)

When it ended we scooped Noah up and left in shame, the whole way home we had to listen to Noah tell us how cool Julia is and how he likes her behaviour and how he likes her more than us.

Oh boy, all we can hope is that they both somehow turn into angles as they get older or Noah grows out of his love affair with her before they are teenagers!