“So,” Emily said. “Am I going to read about the incident on your blog this week?”
Emily was visiting for five days and we did all the things. The foliage tour, the maple creamies, the petting farm, the apple picking, the farmers market. On her last day there was the grand finale: the corn maze.
Never before I had kids would I have considered paying money to do something like this. To be honest, I did not know such things existed. So in case you are a person blissfully unaware of the October phenomenon known as the corn maze, it’s basically a way for a corn farmer to make some extra bucks after the corn has been harvested. By carving a maze of paths through the dried-up cornfield, entire families can be kept entertained for hours—not to mention mildly anxious for their lives.
Most corn mazes also have additional “fun” activities like, and in this particular case:
- The bouncy yard
- The petting zoo
- The pumpkin scale
- The kiddie train
- The hayride
That last one was where I got into trouble. At the end of the afternoon we decided to wait in line to get on the hayride, arguably the most popular attraction, since the line had been long all afternoon. The basic gist is this: you stuff as many people as you can onto a hay truck and then drive them around the farm. Why? Good question. Anyway, it’s a thing you do.
The line was reasonable and so I opted to stand in it with my entire family, including two toddlers, for a good 20-25 minutes. This took a lot of hype on my part. “It’s a hayride! You’re gonna love it!” For the most part, they gamely stood by my side as we patiently waited. By the time the hay truck pulled up to load, Phoebe was excitedly saying “hayride!”
Just as we were about to climb on board, though, the kiddie train pulled up alongside the truck and what seemed like 15 teenagers but was probably only 5 or 7 ran off the train, cut the entire line, and took the last few seats on the hayride. We were incredulous.
At this point in the day, and at any time of day, really, waiting for the next truck for another 20-25 minutes with toddlers was out of the question. Which you may or may not agree made it totally reasonable for me to storm onto the hayride and chew out the teenagers for cutting. Which probably would have gone better had it not been for the mom, who immediately started shouting back at me that she had been holding their spot in line the whole time.
I mean, call me a snob with high expectations for humanity, but if toddlers can wait in line, so can teenagers? Regardless, stealing a seat from a toddler is bad form—but then again, so is yelling at a stranger in public, maybe. And I may or may not have called her a “white-trash bitch.” Oooooooopsie. #notproud
As you can probably guess, nothing much came out of this except that a bunch of teenagers are probably tweeting about “that crazy middle-aged mom at the corn maze,” and we did not get to go on a hayride.
On to the next… the Halloween contest in my hometown. Fellow hippie tiger moms, look out.
