The Playground

In case you were wondering, one of the best ways to break your 5-year-old daughter's heart is to embarrass the tights right off her by making her show up to tap class just as everyone completes the last shuffle-ball-change.

"Do you know what time it is?" the rotten overweight teacher asked. As a matter of fact, no. I don't know many in the preschool crowd who regularly keep the time on them. (The same cannot be said, however, for my son whose incessant time querying has burdened me with extreme exasperation toward the pedant who invented time-telling devices.) Evelina and her dad were the unfortunate and unwitting bearers of my bumbling idiocy. I kept saying the class starts at 5:45 when in reality, it started at 4:45. They were just in time to be ridiculed for missing it all.

So, if you're itching to be the biggest heal of your kid's life, mess up one of her favorite activities and send her along with a misinformed other parent so they both get to look foolish together.