How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Name

TK and I are having trouble thinking of names we like for the new baby. While my brother and SIL had a list of about 15 names they're considering for their son, we can't even come up with one strong contender. It's a problem.

Ethan had been something that has kept popping up on my list of potentials. I've been leaning heavily toward it in the past few days. Until today.

I took the boys to the playground after lunch today. I went to a playground slightly further from our house because it's really a good playground: fully fenced in, relatively small so that I can keep an eye on both of them even when they run in opposite directions, yet still filled with enough fun stuff. Generally, it's worth the 10 or 15 minute car ride, even though there are probably four playgrounds that are closer.

Today, though, someone decided to have their kid's birthday party at the playground. It was an older kid turning 9...kind of old I thought for this pretty small playground! They had both of the tables taken up, so I couldn't sit down. They had all kinds of food kids were carrying around, so I had to be vigilant about no one smearing food on the equipment or getting near B-man with potentially fatal food...I don't know what has nuts in it. But the worst part was that the moms were TOTALLY ignoring their kids.

One kid was especially wild. He was pushing other kids, and throwing wood chips around. A lot. Some of the other kids were yelling about how the "boy in the yellow shirt" was being bad. The moms not part of the party were moving their kids out of the area. N-man strayed too close and got wood chips thrown in his face. Yes, I did tell this boy that it's NOT okay to throw wood chips, then I moved my boys as far away from this kid as was possible in the small playground.

Finally, I don't know what happened, but one of the other moms really yelled at this kid (I guess he'd called her son "stupid"). The mom FINALLY came over and was informed by this awesome mom that she needed to control her son. Probably what I should have done after N-man got wood chips in his face, but to be honest, I'd seen this kid running wild for over 10 minutes by then so I had my doubts about the parenting skills of his mother and the effectiveness of trying to get a mom who obviously didn't care to intervene. I mean, it's a really small playground... she had to have seen the non-stop antics her son was instigating.

So Bad Mom finally comes over. And what does it turn out her son's name is? Ethan. Of course. Ruined the name for me. Bad Mom sucks.

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To be clear, I don't think this was the kid's fault. Well, he was probably eight or nine, so he's certainly old enough to be expected to behave better than he was. However, this was certainly a case where the clueless mom is to blame. If your child has been terrorizing the playground for twenty minutes and other random kids are running around calling your son "the bad kid", it's time for you to step in and remind your child about proper playground behavior.

Yes, I did just get all high-and-mighty about parenting. Nice, huh? I think I'm only half mad at the bad parenting, and half mad at her ruining the only name I had on my name list!

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On a related note, here are recent suggestions from B-man to name the baby. I'm getting worried we might have to go with one of these!

• Dinosaur
• Baby Doll
• B-man 2
• Ginko (what they call their imaginary scape-goat who does all the bad things they "didn't" do.)
• Chocolate Chip
• Four Three Nine
  
• And, in an example of how kids don't know when they're being mean, the name of the boy who cries every day at school (because we've been warning the boys that the new baby will probably cry quite a bit and not to be worried about it).