This past weekend we attended a reunion for a math enrichment summer camp I attended 20 years ago, when I was 16. I probably would have skipped it, but it was being held about 10 minutes from our house, so even with the Wee One and the C-section, I didn’t feel like I could get out of it. It was an okay time — about 10 of us came from the original 48, so a small crowd, but most of us have a few kids so it was a full house nonetheless.

It was interesting to see, as my friend and hostess SuperNiceGirl said, the “range of parenting styles.” It’s a group of people who I haven’t seen in at least 10 years, whose kids I have never met before, so I don’t know their backstories or what they are really like or what their kids are really like. So, working only on snap judgments, I saw a wide range of parents, from Super Involved, to Less Involved But With Super Good Kids, to Not At All Involved with Hooligan Kids.

I was going to post a big rant about how I don’t understand how some parents can just let their kids run wild in someone else’s home with an open marker and white furniture (our hosts don’t have any children of their own). But then I realised I have made this exact same post many, many times before, in regards to the park and the hooligans there. So I won’t bore y’all by repeating myself, but I will say I am mildly concerned at how judgmental I am getting, especially when I know that being a parent is really hard work, and that every parent just does the absolute best that they can. And really, I can’t remotely pretend to know how to be a good parent — really we are just flying by the seat of our pants over here, and we hope our kids turn out okay, but if they do, I won’t really know how to explain how that happened.

But I will say, we try hard not to let our kids run around with open markers in houses with white furniture.