A Thief in the House of Peter Piper
Posted in Culture & Society, Kids, Parenting, True Story on May 5th, 2008
Shannon was a victim of a theft and a theft attempt on Saturday. Both by the same person and in the same place.
After finally finishing up a customer call that made me all but miss a five-year-old’s birthday party, I showed up about an hour late to a six-year-old’s party hoping I could just become a big kid and have some fun. For the record, I was there by invitation with my son and my wife, not just because I like attending little boys’ birthday parties. That would be weird.
I enjoyed some pizza, caught up with Alvis’ parents and in-laws, and ate chocolate cake with chocolate chips in it. So far, so very good.
My wife loves skee ball, and Peter Piper Pizza just happens to feature it along with other games wherein one slides in a token and gets out a number of tickets that increases in direct proportion to the number of points scored.
Benjamin, Shannon, and I made our way to the gaming area and, after we had one of the employees get the lanes working, we were rolling wooden balls up the ramps into scoring rings like nobody’s business. Nobody’s, I say. Well, Benjamin never sent a ball all the way up the lane and over the ramp, but he tried. Only twice did he misfire and send a ball into the adjacent lane, and nobody was hurt.
“Hey, give those back!” I heard Shannon shout. I looked up from my lane to see her reaching for a small boy’s hands. In them were tokens. From the look on Shannon’s face, I figured they must be her tokens. She wrenched the coins free from his left hand but he made off with one in his right and quickly slid it into a video game.
Shannon looked at me, jaw slack. “Did you see what he just did?” She plopped her remaining tokens into a small plastic cup. “Here, hold these, please,” she said and resumed her game.
“Yeah, I guess we won’t be setting them down again.” I pointed down at the string of tickets leading from the dispenser to the floor. “Make sure you pull those out every once in a while. Could be nothing’s safe.”
Figuring we had averted the crisis and had set up adequate defenses, we played on.
“Stop it!” Shannon yelled.
I looked to see her putting her hands over the skee balls remaining in her queue. The thieving kid stood there next to her.
I rushed over and said, firmly, “Hey, you get away from her. If you want to play a game, you don’t take someone else’s things. You go tell your mommy or daddy if you want to play.”
This is, of course, how fights start in Hollywood movies. Mommy or Daddy shows up, just happens to be a behemoth, and the victim gets further victimized. Birthday cake ends up in everyone’s hair, kids sit in the corner and cry as their parents duke it out on a table full of crushed party favors. You know, fun stuff.
As fortune would have it, our lives are more normal than that. We saw the child’s mother later and neither of us said a word, despite Shannon’s urging. “You need to say something to that woman. You can’t just let your kid do that.”
Too bad she took that tack. I was hoping to see her square off right there for all suburbia to see. Again, not Hollywood.
I thought of what I might say, but never got up the nerve. The kid looked to be no older than four. Had he been much older than that, it would have been more serious.
So, what would you have done?
I think I may have said something….
Man, that just irks me to no end!
Hey I am sorry about the Flickr issue…I use it sometimes when my browser fades the color in my image when posting. Crazy! It just really bothers me when I dont see it they way it is intended and that NEVER happens when I blog through Flickr!
Hope you are having a good start to your week…
OTHER THAN THE ROBBERY!
:)
Tell Shannon hey!
I may have given the kid a few tokens…. after all, they ARE just tokens.
Then again, on another day, I’d have asked management to escort him to his parents and let them explain his thievery.
So… there you go. I guess it really depends on what kind of mood I’m in.
I would have given him a stern talking-to, with that tone of voice I have that instills fear in little children’s hearts.
Then I would have waved my fingers in front of his face in a distracting manner and said, “You want to go home and re-think your life.”
Then I would have ordered a drink with a smug look on my face.
The point is not whether or not the tokens were valuable. I realize it’s not like he was trying to steal my purse or anything. The point is that the kid was trying to steal, no matter what it was - it’s wrong and his parents should have taught him otherwise. I didn’t have the courage to say anything to the mom, but I sure wanted to (well, really I wanted Mark to). Not that it would have done any good - I’m sure she would have just argued with him. I would be absolutely appalled if my kid ever did anything like that - hopefully we have taught him better.
Simon, you’re such a goofball (our son’s favorite word right now)!
“You want my skee balls, huh?” I would have yelled as I beaned him in the back of the head with the wooden sphere. Either that or the talking to the parent. ;)
I probably would have threatened to talk to his parents and then done so if he persisted. My loud neighbors have gotten me used to these spoken confrontations, so I don’t think I would have had a problem saying something. Not meanly or anything, just a one parent to another…you know…friendly like. And if that didn’t work, skee ball to the back of the head, baby.
Shannon….I am with you. It is less to do with what he actually took rather than the fact that he was taking something that clearly wasn’t his to have. As a mom, I just feel as though some other parents don’t teach about valuing your own possesions (sp?) as well as those of OTHER people.
Being that I love little kids and am fully aware that at that age, they can hardly be held accountable for the negligence of their parents, I would have cornered the kid, and then calmly told him that what he did wasn’t nice, how would he feel if someone blah blah blah… and hope that something I said may have sunk in for future reference. Then I would urge him to apologize and give him a couple tokens. I truly believe those little buggers learn by example.
Unfortunately for me, I never learned how not to write run-on sentences. By example or otherwise… ;-)