Tuesday, October 16, 2012

The Show and Tell Fiasco

Every Tuesday Jacob has the opportunity to bring something to school for show-and-tell. I have to admit that for the first month he hardly ever brought anything because I wasn't used to our school schedule. We have been doing much better the past few weeks at sending him to school with something fun to show his class.

This week we couldn't decide what Jacob should bring for show and tell. After combing the house, we finally decided that he could take his wind-up airplane. I thought the boys in his class would think it is cool that he would wind up the gun and make the airplane fly by "shooting" it. So I let Jacob take it, but I told him that he just needed to be careful and make sure that if he took it out to recess that he didn't shoot it onto the roof of the school because then we would never get it back!

Jacob came home from school in the afternoon and I asked him how show-and-tell went. He said, "It was fine". I asked him if he got to show his class how his plane worked and he said, "yeah". Then he started to cry. Uh-oh!

So I asked what was wrong. Finally I got Jacob to tell me that on his way out of school he shot off his airplane and it flew over a fence into a pasture. He was sad that he couldn't get his plane and he was afraid that I would be mad at him.

I told Jacob that I wasn't mad and that we would try to get his plane back. We drove over to the back of the school, and sure enough we saw his plane in the pasture. So we tried to figure out which house the pasture belonged to. After knocking on a door we found out that we would have to get to the house from State Street. We located the driveway to the house and headed down to the house.

When we got there I wasn't sure how long we would be gone, so I decided to take the kids with me. I was carrying Amelia in my arms as we walked up the the house and knocked on the door, but no one answered. I could see that someone was out behind the house on a tractor and that there was more than one house-like building, so we decided to go knock at the other one. As we approached the house, a rather large, happy and friendly dog came bounding towards us. Ephraim freaked out! I told him to come stand by me and that the dog was friendly and wasn't trying to hurt him. Of course Ephraim was panicked so he didn't move and the dog decided to be friendly and go say "hi" to Ephraim.

He knocked Ephraim over while Ephraim was practically screaming. By this point I had made it over to Ephraim and picked him up with the arm that wasn't holding Amelia. The dog was not mean at all, just overly friendly. But Ephraim couldn't see that. Luckily the man on the tractor got the dog and locked him up for us.

I apologized and explained why we were there. The nice man took us back to the pasture so we could get the airplane. I told Ephraim to walk with me and everything would be o.k. I promised I would keep him safe. As we walked towards the pasture opening a neighbor dog who was behind a fence ran towards us barking. I told Ephraim, "See? That dog is much scarier than the farmer's nice dog" but when I turned around Ephraim was gone!

He hightailed it back to the van as fast as he could run! So Jacob, Amelia and I got the plane from the pasture (all the while being followed by a friendly cow), thanked the man, and went back to the van. Ephraim was there waiting for us.

I explained to Ephraim that I would not have let the dog hurt him and the dog was just trying to be nice, but I think that he may have a dog phobia for quite some time! Poor kid.

No comments:

Post a Comment