In So Many Words

SCARY BINGO

The first scary thing is a fun thing. Tonight I finished the bingo cards for the school party this Friday. They are a mix of handmade and computer-generated, and each kid will get a bag of candy corn to use for markers. The homeroom parent had done a similar game last year at the Valentine’s party and the kids loved it, so I just adapted it to Halloween. She said they played until every kid had his or her entire card filled up!

Each card has the squares in a slightly different order, and they will get the SCARY space and their own names as freebies before we start drawing cards.

A BIG SCARE FOR BOB

The second scary thing actually happened yesterday when Bob and Michael were out running errands, and luckily I didn’t know anything about it until they were both home safe and sound.

They had gone into the mall near our house and needed to go up to the second floor. Bob didn’t realize that Michael, who had been right behind him, didn’t get on the escalator, so as soon as he got to the top, he came back down to get him. But Michael took off before Bob got down there and then Bob couldn’t find him. It was several minutes before he was paged by security to come get Michael upstairs.

After talking to both of them, it turns out that Bob didn’t know Michael is afraid to step onto an escalator without holding someone’s hand and thought Michael would get on by himself when prompted. Of course, he also thought Michael would wait at the bottom for him to come back down.

Michael, on the other hand, had the idea that if Bob would wait at the top of the escalator, Michael could go up on the elevator and meet him there. So that’s what he did, but then of course Bob wasn’t there because he had come back down and was searching the first floor of the mall for Michael. When Michael couldn’t find Bob, he went into one of the stores nearby to look for him and then approached a “policeman” (mall security guard) for help.

I talked to Michael for what seems like the 100th time about how he has to stay with Mommy or Daddy at all times when we are out somewhere, and also that he can’t just go do an idea he thinks about, but has to talk to us about it first. I did tell him he did the right thing in going to the security officer for help.

This was definitely a big reminder to me that, no matter how well things are going, we need to keep ourselves within an arm’s reach of him at all times when we are out in public. I am just so incredibly thankful that this ended as it did.