Speaking of signs o’ the times…
On Tuesday, Joe had a cross-country meet. We had signed up to drive several of the runners, which meant arriving really early and consequently hanging around a bit.
Good thing it was a beautiful day!
The three little girls took off for the playground, George snored away stapled into his car seat, and Jem and I hung out in the van. (He opted to play with my smart phone while I leafed through the AHG handbook.)
We glanced up when a boy Jem’s age biked past. His hair was neatly trimmed and his eyes were alert, and I remarked that he looked like “friend material.”
And then he did a 180 and we saw several inches of his backside, covered—thankfully—by the plaid fabric of his boxers. “Never mind,” I remarked. The boy stopped his bike in the middle of the intersection, pulled out his cell phone…and started texting!
All this with a car approaching, albeit a hundred yards away.
Being a proactive helicopter-type mom, I got out of the van and called, “I really don’t think that’s the best place to text!” (Back in the van, Jem hid his face in his lap.)
The boy looked over at me—coolly, as if he were considering a smart-alecky response—and called back, “Thank you.” He pedaled off away from the approaching car…and stopped in the middle of a side street to keep texting.
Now this exchange amused me, mainly because of the way my own 12-year-old nearly died of embarrassment. “Really, Mom?” Jem asked as I climbed back in. “Really?”
And then we snorted and joked about all the things I could have said, like…
Really, what would you have done?
I'm assuming you mean Jack Nicholson. 🙂
I would have done the exact same thing!
Woops! Correction duly noted. That's what I get for blogging during classroom breaks.
[insert embarrassed emoticon]
I would have done exactly what you did!
I scream at neighborhood kids all the time when they are being stupid. I would hope any other mom would do the same to my children if they were the stupidity perpetrators. Haha.
(On a side note, I don't know where I heard this, Pioneer Woman maybe, but whenever I don't feel like answering my kids, or whenever I feel like being bothersome, I answer with "YOU CAN'T HANDLE ___________"
I would have done the same thing, although in stronger tones.
HAH!!! Um,,, I am really surprised and glad the young man said "thankyou" instead of something else!
I'd probably have yelled, "Car coming! Get out of the street!"
In my neighborhood, we call kids like that "Hood Ornaments." As in, they're going to BE hood ornaments soon if they don't start paying attention to cars in the street.
Oh, my! Don't even get me started on the whole texting while biking thing. I live in a country where a very high percentage of jr. high and high school aged kids regularly use their bikes for transportation to and from school. Grrrrr!
I have been known to yell a "watch out" from my car window, and I have never gotten that polite of a response. They usually either ignore me and move on, or can't hear me because of their equally dangerous i-pod earphones (double grrr)!
You know, I used to be much more shy in public…before I had my own children. Now I'm rather unabashed about being "mom" to every kid that needs some mothering. And, I hope when my children are older, in need of a motherly reminder, and I'm not around that some other mom will do as you did!
I'm sure that many of the mothers reading here would do the same thing you did. Whether that was the best way to handle it, I'm not so sure. I know that wasn't your question, but maybe you are wondering about that. I would ask your husband or maybe another Boy Scout leader how they would handle it. I suspect that they would have let the car get much closer before initiating anything. Also, that may or may not be a young man that your son knows or will know. Be careful not to step on your son's macho. He needs respect and some compassion towards his relationship with other young men. Even young men that don't really look like friend material. Of course, a honk of the horn or some other alarm in time of real danger is necessary. This is not a perfect world and cell phones are a great temptation to the young.