Alive!

  Today a 10-year-old boy shot my daughter and her friends with a BB gun after school. This gun shot hard plastic BB’s instead of the metal ones, so instead of bleeding, the kids have red welts. Apparently the guy shot the ground around them to scare them, then shot another boy who was in a lot of pain so the girls were really afraid and asked him not to shoot them and he said, “what would you do to me if I shot you?” he was antagonizing and really bullying them. Then he shot them with the gun. They saved one of the hard, green plastic pellets and showed it to me along with all their welts.

I’m not happy about this. We live in this safe town…one of the safest cities in the United States. This is terrifying to me. I don’t want to pigeonhole a child. I believe people have a choice and can change, to label someone is to encapsulate them, to trap them in some way but I absolutely don’t ever want this kind of thing to happen again.  I didn’t call the police. I don’t know if I should have or not. I drove the girls straight over to the houses of the other kids involved and WOW.

Every parent I met today was concerned, involved and ready to sit down together as a group with the kids and come up with a plan to deal with this. So, that’s what we’re going to do as soon as everyone can get together. We’ll see how it goes.

I’ve been neglecting my blog because of the holidays, the flu, redecorating my master bathroom and renovating my kitchen but I assure you I am still alive.  I had the opportunity to visit the Slater Memorial Museum in Connecticut this November, one of the few museums in the world featuring plaster casts of world famous renaissance and classical sculpture from the Louvre and Vatican and other fabulous places (a practice no longer permitted). I have completed the necessary release paperwork to post an image from their collection so I will be writing on that soon!