You do if you’re going to deep fry them. But I find that takes too much oil. That and adult sized deep fryers are hard to come by.
Can you not comprehend the difference between idly bumping, an ordinary incident of human contact, and being intentionally hit, repeatedly, by a child – Often with a blunt object the non-attentive parent has helpfully given them? We definitely do live in different worlds!
Not only does their parent ignore them they yell at you if you say “stop it! hitting is wrong!”
I see you too object to bodily fluids being smeared in your food.
Tabasco sauce bottles may not break easily, but they do break and hot sauce is excruciating when it finds its way into a cut. I don’t have any issues with my seven-year-old carrying a glass container, but I would have problems with a toddler doing it, especially when it’s a toddler who picks the bottle up because it looks interesting enough to play with. Older kids understand the concept of “be careful with glass”. A toddler, well, not so much.
I childproofed my house. But they got in anyway!
True story: My son, between age 3 and 4, stuck a fork into an electrical socket. He needed the fork in order to pry off the childproofing.
Today, that child is an electrical engineer.
So there.
He must have gotten his analytical abilities from the other parent.
Equally annoying;
Parents who’s toddler has learned a new word and the parent keeps interrupting the child to say; “Say ‘unique’. Say ‘quizzical’. Say ‘specific’.” As impressive as it no doubt is, I just want to scream at them, “Are you raising a child or training a seal.” It’s quite baffling and leaves me unsure how to react. I try to be duly impressed but, damn, the child is occupied doing whatever, leave them the hell alone. Do your dance. Recite your whatever. All fall into this category. If someone is truly interested or impressed and asks the child, “Will you show me?”, that’s one thing, interrupting them to demand they perform makes them look like a trained seal and you an idiot. Please don’t do this with your children.
And, while we’re at it, don’t teach them swear words or insults and then have them perform as if they were performing seals. No, it’s not “cute” that you taught your 2 year old to say “motherfucker” or “you want fries with that?”. Really, it’s not.
But if we could just cure little girls from that high pitched shriek that they emit (some of them–my daughter didn’t and thank god)… world peace would not be far behind.
Meh, if I spend every minute hyper concerned about everything that possibly could happen, I’d be a nervous wreck. I don’t think that is a healthy environment for me or my daughter. She does learn when she falls and hurts herself. I’m baffled that people think toddlers can’t get cause and effect. Mine does. Even if the Tobasco sauce bottle breaks AND cuts her AND it gets in her cuts, its not the end of the world.
Not for you maybe, but if she doesn’t make her way onto our dinner table, then it is for us.
But then, you’re name is WarmNPrickly, so perhaps you are predisposed to liking Tabasco sauce? 
The resulting shrieking, commotion and mess, while not the end of the world, is a major disruption in my dining experience and one I’d rather not endure. Obviously, YMMV.
For me, it’s not about being hyper concerned or helicopter parenting; it’s about anticipating mishaps and preventing them for the good of all. IOW, you don’t give your toddler complete freedom at a BBQ–she may hurt herself, others or disrupt others. You don’t allow your toddler to have a plastic whistle in public because he will make others homicidal with his use of it. You don’t allow your kid to jump on a waiting room with or without shoes because that is not appropriate “in public” behavior etc.
It’s not hard and it’s not over-involved parenting. It’s good manners.
ha ha - my youngest is just starting to read and I was trying to show my mom today (she’s his grandmother - she’s interested). I pointed to a word and said, “What does this say?” He gave me a withering look and said, “You know what it says,” and went back to playing. Hmph.
Toddlers get cause and effect, or at least they do once they’ve had a reason to. A toddler who drops a bottle of hot sauce and cuts herself isn’t going to do it again. And you’re right; it’s not the end of the world if she does cut herself.
Lord knows the sprog has hurt himself plenty of times. He’s had a black eye and numerous cuts and scrapes and bumps and bruises. But he’s seven, and seven-year-olds get hurt. It’s part of being seven. How he’s managed to stay out of the ER is beyond me. I just clean up the cuts and scrapes and life goes on.
That said, however, part of my job as a responsible adult is to prevent stupid accidents, especially ones that have serious consequences. It’s one thing to get a scraped-up knee. It’s another to allow a small child to run around with a glass bottle. The first is going to happen. The second doesn’t have to.
Oh, I leave such a situation faster than you could imagine. It isn’t really true that my child has never thrown a tantrum in public. My wife and I just have an established action plan of removing the child immediately. For the moment, my daughter is extremely well behaved in public, but should the bottle break and get in her eyes and get in her cut and she starts shrieking, she would no longer be the problem of the guests at that BBQ. We would be on are way to the bathroom to triage then home or the ER if she can’t be calmed. I personally have a superhuman ability to block out “kid throwing tantrum”, but I know most don’t.
OTOH, if someone were to take the bottle of Tobasco from her, I would totally respect that decision.
Marriedbro and his wife are raising their second seal. The other day, after making The Kidlette demonstrate her ability counting to ten (that is, reciting eight of those ten numbers, in order; which ones get missed varies every time), my sister in law said “
you know, I’m starting to think maybe she can’t really count ”, to which Unmarriedbro replied “no! really! now you notice?”
She was terribly and genuinely surprised when The Kidlet started being taught how to count in school and not only could not do it, but the teacher said he was having additional problems due to the seal-training and to please Not Do That. The Kidlet can recite the first ten numbers, so he thinks he can count… but he can’t. You lift a bunch of items, ask him to count them, and he just raps out “1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10! Done!”
I hate being accused of not wanting to be around children like it’s a bad thing. I’ll play with my nephew and niece, but honestly, kids really don’t interest me. They can’t carry a conversation, they’re boring as shit, and I really hate playing the same game 2701 times. If I wanted that, I’d have been a parent.
If you want me to understand you, and I direct this pretty much towards anyone who think i should be ecstatic to take care of any child that stumbles across my path, then I have every right to ask that you understand me. I don’t really like playing with kids - and that’s perfectly OK. I don’t expect my life to be without kids every moment of every day but there is a vast difference between a kid:
a) crying in a market or restaurant, this happens
b) merely being in a market or restaurant, even playing,
c) and running up and down the aisles on Good Friday in the grocery store, with about 50000 people doing their Easter shopping, which I saw on Friday, and indeed the kid smacked face-first into someone’s cart.
That kid should have been controlled.
Next time, I should just let a little girl drown while her dad flies a kite and her mother reads a novel?
Total agreement from me here. I don’t hate kids; I dislike annoying ones. Another note to parents - no one loves your kid as much as you do. You have to understand that the world basically doesn’t care about your kid. There are almost seven billion of us - another small human is no big deal.
Sure, in some philosophical sense in the grand scheme of things other people don’t matter, but life is a lot nicer when we try to act like they do.
A lot of parents simply do not understand that a toddler needs supervision, for although a toddler is about the same size and shape of a rugby ball, it makes for a poor replacement for a rugby ball by virtue of having greater mass and less surface tension for drop kicks. I realize that if you are having a toddler for a post game BBQ, the odds are that the little nipper will be present at the game, but that does not relieve the parent of the responsibility to keep the toddler off the pitch, so that the players can play with a real ball, the spectators can watch the game rather than the toddler, and the toddler can avoide being overly tenderized before the BBQ.
Yes. Otherwise they’ll never learn.