It certainly looks like an instrument of torture, doesn’t it?

In fact when I was a young child, I remember seeing one of those in our bathroom (and mercifully the memories of it having been used upon me blanked out) and thinking that something that looked like that could only be used for nefarious purposes.

It is bad enough to have a baby/young child with a cold.

What makes it ten times worse is that you have to use the bulb to suck out the mucous, and in doing so, the child in question screams bloody murder and is obviously quite certain that you are trying to suck out their brains.

At least that is certainly what my daughter was thinking as I would approach with the bulb, and the terror in her eyes was enough to make your heart melt.  However, the only option other than not suctioning is that they can’t breathe, so the choice is obvious.  Heartless mama that I am, I would have to pin her little arms down else she would try to push my hands away.  I in no way blamed her, and that must make it all the more traumatic that your mother is purposefully putting you in a chinlock and attempting to remove your brains from your head via your nose.

After one such session, which resulted in screams and tears heard ’round the block, I came out of the room and made a feeble joke about our neighbors thinking we are horrible parents.  My husband looked at me and said, “Forget the neighbors, I almost called Child Services on you myself.”

I don’t know what is so hard about the pick-up/drop-off line at school.

You wait your turn, you wait in your car until your child enters/exits the vehicle, the doors of the vehicle close, and you drive off. 

It’s that simple.

But you wouldn’t know it based on the antics at my son’s school.

It isn’t the “I’ll get out of my car and chat with my yoga buddy (whom I will be seeing at class later in the evening) and leisurely saunter over to my car with my child, taking my sweet time and blocking traffic” line.

It isn’t the “I’ll try to pretend I’m taking the exit, then suddenly swoop into the line, enraging the thirty vehicles who have been patiently waiting their turn behind me.”

It isn’t the “door to door service  in which I must make sure that my child is never any further than five feet from the gate” line.

It isn’t the “I will abandon my car altogether, thus creating chaos further down because the line cannot move because the six other twits who have done the same thing are making sure no one else can drive up.”

Nor is it the “The kid has been sucessfully dropped-off/picked up, but for some reason I am waiting for the stars to align before I move.”

If the pick-up/drop-off line is a barometer of our civilization, then it is in a steep and ugly decline.