Guest Post by: Michelle Eisenberg

There is a photo of me, at age 2 or 3, with my dad in the Count’s Ball Crawl at Sesame Place.  I am crying my eyes out and my father is looking back at the camera, bewildered.  You can almost hear him saying, “What am I supposed to do now?

What was he supposed to do after waiting 45 minutes in the heat to get to the front of the line?

What was I supposed to do the other week after I drove through a snowstorm to get to a kiddie concert, only to have my son shriek at the top of his lungs when we arrived at the door?

What do you do if you’ve driven around for an hour waiting for the WK&S Railroad to open and your little engineer chickens out?

You turn around and go home.  Sometimes you just can’t cajole a toddler into enjoying something – and heaven knows you can’t reason with them – after they’ve made up their mind about something.  And of course there’s that terrible self-consciousness when your kid is acting up in public:  Will he scare away the other kids?  What will these people think of my son?  What do they think of me?

The signs of protest, while unwanted, are not actual bad behavior.  Most likely, there’s something about the activity at hand that’s frightening to your child – and she doesn’t have the words to tell you.  Days later, your kid might say, “The big train made a lot of noise” and you’ll know that the adventure you thought would be so appealing was a little more than she could handle.

As a parent, these scrubbed missions leave me a little annoyed (“There’s three hours of my life that I won’t get back…) but mostly disappointed.  All I was trying to do was to have a little fun with my son, , create a good memory, expand his horizons.  No one wants to make their kid cry!

So you analyze, and think of what you can do differently next time.

I am happy to report that just two weeks after the ill-fated concert attempt, we had a fantastic time at the Choo-Choo Soul concert.  Key ingredients:  a full belly, a good nap, an ornate theater for distraction, familiar characters, and maybe a little more patience on my part.

Will I have the same luck next time?  Could depend on the day, the hour, the way the planets are aligned… But I will be prepared to follow Plan A or Plan B.

–Michelle Eisenberg