>Mommy Gazing

You can’t call yourself a parent in Nashville without visiting Gentry Farms each fall. The place is a preschooler’s harvest-time fantasy, with pint-sized barn mazes, cows, goats and sheep, tire swings, slides, a pretend General store they can play in, troughs full of feed to scoop up with tiny shovels, and a hayride around the property to visit the cows and view the historic homes.

With all the running and sliding and scooping and petting sure to happen, I dressed Punky in her cutest play clothes for the trip; after all, there are lots of photo opportunties in front of old fashioned pumpkin-filled trucks and on barn porches, but there’s also a lot of dirt and animal dung. We spent the afternoon letting her run wild; by the end of the day, her fingernails were rimmed with mud and a line of dirt had formed around her face. She was tired, dirty, and very, very happy.

So you can imagine my shock upon noticing that a few moms had chosen to bring their kids to the farms in their hand-smocked, bow-headed best. While all the other kids were running around in the dirt, these children were posed uncomfortably in front of haybales, tugging at their monogrammed collars and scratching their stockinged knees. What. The. Hell.

Did the kids’ moms not realize that was they were inflicting the worst form of torture on their sons and daughters? Take a child to a filthy wonderland, but tell them not to go down a slide, run around, or touch anything? Brilliant.

At any rate, it made me feel better about all the things I do wrong as a mom. Look around; there’s always someone doing it worse. The romper moms probably saw me giving Punky a sugar cookie and a juice box and tsk-tsked right back at me. This is why moms need very little oversight; we do a fabulous job of policing each other.

This post originally appeared on Parents.com.