Earlier this week, one of the 2Blowhards wrote a post about the differences between Breeders & Non-Breeders. One of the big questions is which side is more selfish.
At present, I’m sitting in the President’s Club at the airport in Cleveland. There 7 or 8 other people here, mostly solo, awaiting flights. I was trying to read the book that I bought with me — Ian McEwan’s Saturday
Rather than go to the family room with them, mom and the loud, exuberant kids settled down about 20 feet away from me. She asked the kids what movie they wanted to watch. They settled on Flushed Away, so she put the DVD in their laptop, and is now playing the movie at full volume, without headphones. She has a newspaper covering her face. Evidently, it’s one of those newfangled ones that blocks the daggers that I’m shooting at her.
Speaking as a mother of three children under the age of four, that mother’s behavior is pretty bad, I think. Way to teach your kids to have no respect for the people around them. When I have my kids in an airport, we sit around conjugating Greek verbs and discussing the Iliad. When that doesn’t work, I at least invest in headphones for them.
I should’ve provided an update before I boarded. About 30-40 minutes into the movie, one of the other guests in club walked over to her and asked her to turn the volume down. The woman went to her bag, pulled out two sets of Bose headphones and a dual jack, plugged the setup into the laptop and gave the kids the headphones.
Which is to say, she knew that the kids could just use the headphones, but decided to impose on the rest of the guests because the Presidents Club was her living room.