Scary experience

Last evening the girls and my mom and I set out for a 5-10 minute walk around the block. We live in a quiet neighborhood and the weather was nice. We were just a couple of houses away at the corner when my mom wanted me to stop and do something. The girls were a couple of houses ahead, two of them on scooters and one on foot. I felt torn between the demands of each, so I decided to stop and do what my mom wanted and sent the girls on ahead to go around the block and told them Grama and I would meet them coming around the backside of the block.

In a couple of minutes my mom and I walked the short block to see the girls coming down the back of the block but they weren't there. I was surprised because by then they should have been about half way down the block. I scratched my head a bit, wondering how they could have been so slow that they hadn't come down that back side. My mom and I started back to our street when Elizabeth came tearing down the street on foot, telling me the other two where headed out "to the city."

WHAT???

Our neighborhood is quiet, but we live close to busy, intersecting streets. The girls were supposed to loop back to our house, not continue out to the busy area! I sent Elizabeth to walk home with Grama, but then realized I needed her to show me which direction the other girls had gone. I called dh and he met Grama, then hopped in his car. Elizabeth showed me which direction they'd gone and it was right out to the busy street. We turned out onto the sidewalk (thank goodness for sidewalks!) in the dusk and I could just make out two little ones on scooters about half a long block away from us. I was never so relieved. I called dh and he came back and picked them up once we got back into our neighborhood and I carried the scooters home.

When we got home and debriefed I found out it was even worse than I thought. My seven year old and my five year old rode their scooters to the busy intersection, crossed the street with the signal, and THEN decided they must be lost and started to retrace their steps. I am absolutely flummoxed at why they went the way they did and why they thought that was "going around the block."

After the girls are finished being grounded, we will definitely take a walk "around the block" so I can show them what that means. That part was my fault, thinking they knew more than they did. But as Caroline Ingalls (Ma Ingalls) would say, "All's well that ends well."