8.06.2013

how our city commissioner saved the day in tot school

This morning my sister helped co-teach the toddler dance class at her studio and I tried, for the second time, to start Ethan in dance class. The reason the class failed the first time was because the kids have to go in a room alone and the parents wait in the lobby which is a total no-go for Ethan who hasn't been away from me, oh, ever. I thought maybe now that he's older and my sister, his favorite person in the world, would be in the room, we'd have a better shot. We didn't. He came out screaming so hard that I was basically cloaked in guilt and could feel my toddler's shattered sense of stability heavy in the air. Luckily, a lunch date with one of his favorite friends was enough to turn his mood around and make him forget about his traumatic morning, though he did make sure to mention as we were driving home that "Ethan no have fun dance. No more dance." Message received loud and clear, kid. Anyway, after lunch, we made our way to City Hall. I've been dying to blog about this story all day, so bear with me.

I'm a little bit of a dork when it comes to our hometown. You wouldn't get this if you read my diaries in high school which mostly declared how I couldn't wait to get the heck out of here because it was cruelly "boring" but, you know, once you're old and a parent with a child of your own, it's the kind of boring you're looking for. (That was meant with love, of course.) I love it here, in our little city, and Ethan has already learned how to proudly boast he lives here. Rewind a little to a couple of days ago when I made a post about swapping postcards. See, we live in the suburbs surrounded by more suburbs and everyone is strangely interconnected -- as in, I could drive three minutes to my mom's house in another city altogether, we share a grocery store, even, but we live in two different cities. The problem I came across was that our local stores only carried postcards for surrounding cities, even though the stores were in our city. This was fine at first until Ethan reminded me in the form of a toddler tantrum that these other cities, well, they weren't ours. Since I've been trying to teach him about our hometown with the same obnoxious level of pride I share about it, it was a little counterproductive to explain to a two year old why we were sending postcards of other cities. He can't read, but he sure can list his favorite things to do in our hometown for the recipient and none of them made any sense when smacked on the back of a Boca Raton postcard, even if we drove in and through Boca daily. "Ethan live Coral Springs," he'd insist, throwing my Intracoastal view of Boca Raton postcard on the floor. Noted.

Naturally, I did what any sane, rational person would do -- and tweeted our city's commissioner about the postcard fiasco. Like, where are our postcards? How is my kid supposed to understand his tot school geography lesson when I'm sending out all the wrong postcards? My husband couldn't believe I was using Twitter to inquire about postcards to our commissioner. But remember my dorky love for our hometown? How I'm all "we live in the best city ever!" all the time? Well, our commissioner (who, yes, I voted for proudly!) not only wrote me back right away, but he kept me posted through the weekend of the progress of the postcards and this afternoon they were ready for us to pick right up at the front desk of City Hall.

I mean, awesome, right? And that's just another reason why we live in the best city in the world! Thanks to Commissioner Daley for saving the day in tot school! Ethan and I can't wait to spread our hometown pride across the globe!

3 comments:

  1. Oh my gosh, I forgot we were supposed to send a postcard! Yikes. It's sitting on our island since I bought it LAST WEEK! Mommy fail. We will write it tomorrow. :-)

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  2. That's awesome that you got such a great response from the commissioner! I have our postcard(s) in our car..just waiting on myself to remember stamps! And yes, you'll be getting a few of them because for the love of everything good and holy I can't just pick one!

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