WTF?!

I took Little Woodchuck to a party she was invited to yesterday. She had a lot of fun, though I was exhausted by the end of the party because I ran around after her the entire time. It was an outside party, and the place was not as toddler safe as I would have liked.

Which leads me to the WTF. Literally, I was the only parent keeping a close eye on her child. There was a five-foot rocky drop off in one section of the yard, and a 12-month-old nearly went over the edge because her mother was busy socializing elsewhere on the property. Another parent snatched up the baby just before she plunged over the drop off. The hostess of the party, in addition to having a four-year-old, has two 14-month-old babies who were allowed to free range over the place while the hostess was inside having a drinky-poo. The four-year-old was useless in watching her younger siblings.

There was an old barn next to the house, full of junk, with the doors wide open. No one was preventing the babies from wandering or crawling in there. I got more and more depressed and stressed as the free-for-all went on. I'm raising my child on a working farm, for pete's sake, and I'm super-cautious to make sure she doesn't get hurt.

The last straw was when the kids were all playing in the meadow below the rocky drop-off. I was, again, the only parent down there keeping an eye on things. The rest were up by the house and in the house getting cocktails. I noticed that the 12-month-old had somehow managed to make her way down to the meadow, too, without going over the drop-off, and she was headed right for a muddy spot in the meadow. As she toddled over to it, I shouted up at the other parents, "Um, if that's your baby, she's heading for the leach field!" I was at that moment trying to separate two boys who were whacking each other hard with sticks, and keep a close eye on Little Woodchuck at the same time.

"What's a leach field?" I heard someone call out from up at the house level. I yelled back, "The overflow from the septic system, and your kid has got her hands in it!"

A bunch of parents trotted over to the top of the drop-off to see. None of them was the 12-month-old's mother, by the way. I heard them all gasp as the baby plunged her hands in the mud and shove fistfuls into her mouth. I was 50 yards away across the meadow, and made the executive decision at that moment that the septic mud baby issue was not my problem. My job was to watch my own child. Yes, if that baby was about to wander into traffic, I would have made it my problem, but this situation was not quite at that level of danger. Finally, someone fetched the mom who was in the house somewhere, she retrieved the baby who was now completely covered in leach field mud and had a good amount of it in her stomach as well, and carried her off to the house to clean her up.

When Mister Woodchuck arrived to pick us up (it was a two-hour party), I said to him quietly through clenched teeth, "Get us the hell out of here." We were the first to leave, and our farm never looked so sweet as when we pulled into the driveway after the drive home.