And to All a Good Night...

          If ever you need to feel better as a parent, look no further than this blog.  It is loaded—loaded, I tell you—with my own examples of major parenting blunders.  In fact, if you scroll through Joniopolis and you are a publisher, you will consider compiling these into quite a comprehensive collection.

          And now, because this is the time for Christmas choirs around the world, I shall share yet another of my mothering mistakes.  Have your kids ever been in a school choir?  Of course they have. And we all love to gather in auditoriums and watch our little punkins in elf hats and reindeer noses, singing their hearts out.

          Well, when our eldest boys were in grade school, they attended Viewpoint School in a Los Angeles suburb. 

          And every December the kids climbed onto risers onstage, and sang beautiful songs about Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa, and all the rest. 

          Except one year Richie had bronchitis.  What to do? I knew he was no longer contagious, but that lingering cough would surely disrupt the program.  The teachers wanted every child to perform, Richie enjoyed it, and we were just young enough as parents, that we didn’t realize how many more opportunities there would be.  (You know how it is when they’re in grade school—you think you need to save every spelling test, attend every assembly, teach them to be reliable…)

          So I figured a spoonful of cough medicine would be the perfect way to quiet the storm for a couple of hours, right?  There’s just one problem: Benadryl Cough Syrup makes you sleepy.  Really sleepy.

          So there they were, all the kids standing in rows on the bleachers, singing about having a Merry Christmas when suddenly one boy got shorter and shorter, then finally slumped down, sat on his step, and fell fast asleep. Yikes—the first comatose performer in Viewpoint’s history.

          Yes, we had to pull him off stage, wake him up and take him home.  No, I did not sit by the phone awaiting a call from the Mother of the Year people awarding me my medal. And I apologized to the music director, and every other parent who mentioned it to me thereafter. Of which there were more than one or two.

          On the other hand, maybe he was the only one acting out a Christmas lyric: “Sleep in heavenly peace…”

          You can also Christmas shop in heavenly peace by clicking here for any number of my books!