Oh, the Guilt!

Part of my daily amusement stems from asking Toby what he did in “circle time” each day. Sometimes his answer consists of a lively song, a question, the mention of a particularly notorious kid who bit or hit someone else or a simple answer, “nothing”.

Yesterday I happened to ask him the question while we were still at daycare, which was good because I could then go and check on the calendar wall and verify what exactly he was talking with. His answer was an excited mess of words about safe and unsafe animals, dogs and cats and whales. As he talked excitedly his emotions fluctuated from concern about the “unsafeness” of his tiger costume for Halloween to a morose lamentation of the fact that he didn’t have a dog NOR a cat at home.

Sure enough –it’s pet week at daycare. Their circle time discussion had centered on what pets were and were not safe to keep as pets. The poor kid had obviously realized that he was left out of the dog or cat ownership clan and then upon trying to make up for it by announcing that he had a tiger (costume) was probably told it was unsafe.

“Well,” I told him matter-of-factly, trying to hide my sadness for his dejection, “You’re getting a baby brother or sister which is even BETTER than a pet,”

He thought about this on the way home and his silence on the matter mistakenly made me assume that he’d conceded.

Not 10 minutes later as I was changing out of my work clothes did Toby BURST into the bedroom exclaiming, “I have a PET, mommy! LOOK!!! I found a PET!!!” Praying it wasn’t a snake I rushed out of the closet to see my little boy remarking over his newfound pet that he was lovingly and carefully carrying over to show me.

It was a dead fly.

I don’t doubt that dead flies are considered “safe pets” by his daycare’s standards, (if you ignore the obvious health risks of handling them), but I hope tomorrow they’ll make some mention of useful vs. not so useful pets and maybe I won’t feel quite so guilty about having made him throw his first pet into the garbage…