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Community Corner

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Not one of which says anything good about our parenting

I woke up from a nap this weekend to discover I had become extremely popular while I was asleep. (Yay! All the wishing I did in junior high school finally came true!) During the course of my slumber, I had received 65 new messages in my personal e-mail inbox. When I clicked on the inbox, I realized every single message was from my husband. While I can appreciate stalking shows how much he cares (flashback to our dating days), we’re married now and it frankly just seems like overkill.

It took me a moment to realize the e-mails were actually from my daughter, who was sending them from the account on her father’s iPad — something we had taught her so she could send pictures to me, my husband and her grandmother. My daughter knows if she types in the first letter of any of our names, the e-mail address will populate automatically and she can send along her original work. So now, in addition to the 6,000 drawings that come home from kindergarten every day, we have electronic “artwork” to contend with as well.

It’s easy enough to delete and really, the fact the drawing occupies her for pretty substantial amounts of time is worth the little bit of hassle caused by an overloaded inbox. Or at least we thought so until this past weekend.

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During the weekend, my husband and my daughter had a difference of opinion. He felt she should brush her teeth and she felt the man should stop trying to keep her down. With her typical flair for the dramatic, she took to the iPad and created two pieces of art to reflect her suffering — one drawing, a bunch of scribbles and the words “Bad Avery” in big letters and the other drawing — a bunch of scribbles and the words “Bad Daddy.” She put an exclamation point on this expression of angst by firing them off to her usual distribution list. Due to an issue with the connection, the e-mails remained unsent until about 3 a.m. the following morning.

The next day, my mom replied with a simple, “I’m sure there’s a story here.” I simply deleted them. Tim did absolutely nothing. Because, you see, he never received them. Instead of Tim’s e-mail address, Avery had inadvertently added the e-mail address for Tom, the coach for her 6-and-under soccer team.

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I don’t want to know what her soccer coach was thinking when he saw a disturbing picture that said “Bad Daddy” sent at 3 a.m., and therefore, we figured the best course of action was to assume there was a good chance he deleted it as spam before he read it.

Until we hear otherwise from Child Protective Services, anyway.

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