Thanksgiving weekend - bad "sharing" start

F and P "sharing" the iPad

My "weekend" started Tuesday afternoon. A few years ago I would be celebrating. Nowadays, with two young kids at home I'm cursing F's and P's schools. Did they really need to close a day before the actual Holiday? Isn't a 4-days weekend long enough?! Apparently not.

Having said that, I need to entertain my children for the next few days. Knowing that today, with almost everything closed, New York will be like a ghost city and tomorrow, with all the "Black Friday" sales going on, it could actually be dangerous to be on the streets, this is not going to be an easy task. Hopefully the sun will shine and brighten my mind to find exciting activities for them.

***

Since it was raining yesterday, we started by going to our local bookstore. We sat on the floor to read some books and P started playing with a lot of little books that had the shape of different cars and had wheels on them. He was happy and quiet, which made it very easy for me to read to F. But, suddenly, out of nowhere, this little girl arrives and starts to take P's books out of his hands (she wasn't aggressive or anything, just annoying). And the nanny, instead of taking her to play with something else (and teaching her not to bother other people), started saying to P that he had to learn how to share.

Well, you know what? I'm tired of this "sharing" thing among toddlers that is so important here in the U.S.! Why do children need to share everything? Besides, we were in a bookstore, where there were tons of other books! Why did she have to disrupt our peaceful moment? Because, of course, while she was there complaining that P wasn't sharing the books, I had to stop reading to F, as P was getting upset and started to cry.

It's not that I'm teaching my kids not to share, but I think the Americans overreact with this particular aspect and overuse the word "sharing". If we are at home, yes, the kids need to share their toys with their friends. If they are at school, they also need to share the toys or crayons with the other kids. However, if I take my kids to the park, for example, I don't understand why on earth they should be sharing their toys with other kids (they never met before) if they don't want to. I certainly don't want to "share" my cell phone when I'm at the park. And I would be really upset if I was reading a book in a bookstore and suddenly another person would take it out of my hands. So, why do we need to teach something to our kids that would obviously annoy us if we were in the same situation? 

Nonetheless, I'm like all the other mothers at the park, telling my kids to share everything. Taking toys out of their hands in the name of this glorious task of learning how to share. Even yesterday, although I was visibly annoyed by the nanny's attitude and I thought it was unfair towards P, I was telling him to share the books. Thankfully, she left after ten bad minutes.

 ***

We spent the rest of the day at home quietly. Actually, the kids stayed at home and I had the terrible idea to go grocery shopping. Here's my advice: never do that before a Holiday and, certainly, never take the subway during rush hour right before the Holiday.

I hope the rest of the weekend will be better than yesterday. I'm sorry if I'm not sounding very positive today, but I just had to get the "sharing" incident out of my system. Now I can move on. We finished the night ordering Chinese and watching "Carlos" (not very good and way too long).

I think I was just having a bad day and I had to "share" this with you :)

P not sharing anything, just thinking about his own shoes

Happy Thanksgiving!