The Car Slap

When I was a young driver, say sixteen or seventeen, I had something happen to me one day that I have never forgotten.   I had stopped at a gas station to get gas in my parent's old, blue Mercedes.   To get into the available spot, I had to back into the row and this was something I wasn't that good at doing, given my inexperience at driving.

As I worried about getting in line with the pump, I suddenly heard a "WHAP" on the car.   I hit the brakes and turned in the other direction to see and older man calmly filling up his car with gas.  I was so concerned about getting to the best spot to fill the car that I wasn't noticing everything else around me and I had gotten too close to him.  

His message was simple, easy to do and hard to ignore.   He never said a word to me, just that single slap on the car.   It didn't hurt the car, and as a result, he wasn't hurt either.  He wasn't upset (that I could tell) either.  

To this day, I haven't forgotten about that car slap.   There have been several times in my life that I've almost done the same thing to another car.  It's a simple way to prevent a possibly bad situation.

The Big Boy Update:  Arm pit itchy.   We went to the pool today.  It was a different pool than the one we usually go to and I think it may have been a chlorine pool and not a saline pool.   My son's skin has good and bad days and sometimes pool water can cause it to become more irritated.  During lunch he started itching his arm pit and he would not stop.   He was getting close to causing it to bleed in several areas so we packed up, got in the car and I put on the cream we keep handy for just such things.  When we got home I put on the steroid cream in the worst spots and now he's asleep, feeling much better and much less itchy.  One of the other moms at the pool today has the same situation with her son, with very similar reactions that my son does.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter likes to cut paper.  She likes to cut paper with small, sharp, pointy adult scissors.  She will sit on the carpet and very carefully work with the paper and scissors.   We have learned from their schooling that children have the capacity to understand how to be careful and that things can be dangerous.   She does a very good job with the scissors, although she tears the paper more than she is successful with cutting.