Normally I'm really tolerant of crying babies. We've all been there, and I remember a particularly horrific 4 hour plane journey where J screamed all the way and the tuts and looks and head-shakes were not nice.
You can't get off a plane though. Whereas, there are many situations where you can remove the crying baby, and should do. I think that tonight's is one: I was at J's drama show, where kids from age 5-15 were performing various little drama pieces in a huge hall, huge audience, no microphones .
The company had said in the letter about the show that, while they understood that some parents had to bring younger siblings, could they please be taken out if they were disturbing the show.
Well, clearly some people decided to ignore that. One family had two toddlers who ran around for most of the evening - loudly - and then also had a baby who screamed for the first 45 minutes, totally drowning out the quiet younger performers.
Lots of tuts but nobody actually said anything. But why were they not ashamed to be ruining so many kids' nights? I was particularly stressed by it because J hates babies and I thought that he would have a meltdown (he has autism), but managed to cope with his fingers in his ears, bless him.
It went well; I was very proud of J, but why why why did this family put themselves and everyone else through that?
I get that they both wanted to see their child perform, but they should have either got a babysitter, one of them have stayed at home and the other videod it or, when the baby screamed, removed it from the hall and calmed it...or aibu?!