‘I forgot my daughter in the playground’

Whether it’s fatigue or pure absent-mindedness: the chance that you will commit a parenting blunder is quite high, these parents know.

Inge (37): “When my neighbor and I go to the playground with our children, we often take half the street with us. Can we act just fine? And we have to do surprisingly little for that: they play, we chat on a rug. It always goes well. After an afternoon of playing we drum up all the children again, scan and count quickly, no one has lost their bicycle key, so we can go home.

To forget

Until one afternoon I saw one of the children looking rather suspiciously at the empty saddle on the front of my bicycle, before she said softly: ‘Ehh Inge, I think we’re forgetting something.’ Oh, that’s where my daughter should have been. We wouldn’t have come very far without her. When she saw us leave, she raised her throat. Until we got home, she screamed that we had forgotten her. And I thought we had counted all the heads. One, two… too many to count.”

Also read – Education bloopers: ‘I sat there, feeding our son with a whipped cream syringe’ >

Gang member missing

Margaret (36): “At the out-of-school care where I work, we sometimes go out with the whole gang. With forty children and six supervisors, that is quite a challenge, especially if we take the tram.

Recently we went to a playground. I breathed a sigh of relief as I parked everyone in their seats. Just before the doors closed, I saw a toddler get up out of the corner of my eye. Apparently he had seen something outside that he had to pick up or something.

“Before I knew it, the child was outside and the doors were closing.”

Before I knew it, the child was outside, the doors closed and we set out with 39 children. At the next stop I jumped out of the tram and sprinted. The kid was waiting neatly on the sidewalk.”

Receive Kek Mama every month with a discount and shipped for free to your doorstep! Subscribe now and pay only €4.19 per edition.