By Joelle Wisler of Running From Mountain Lions
It was 11:00 a.m. at Shady Oaks Playground when parents Madelyn and Patrick Johnson fearfully told their 3-year-old daughter, Pearl, that it was time to go home.
“It was the strangest thing,” Patrick said. “She just took my hand and said ‘OK!’ in a cheerful voice and headed toward the car.”
“Yes,” added Madelyn. “She normally screams hysterically or tries to murder us, but this time she just got in her car seat and she didn’t try to bite me when I strapped her in or anything. It definitely had me worried.”
The Johnsons became even more concerned when Pearl’s strange behavior continued after they arrived home. Reportedly, the child ate all of her lunch, including a rogue tomato from her mom’s salad, and then took a nap without protest.
“It was the tomato that convinced me that someone had definitely drugged our daughter,” Patrick said. “Our Pearl is psychotically opposed to tomatoes. This child was not behaving like our Pearl.”
When asked about possible suspects in the alleged drugging, the Johnsons reported that there had been a suspicious 4-year-old boy with a blue Kool-Aid mustache seen loitering around Pearl’s sippy cup earlier in the day.
“I know that little shit slipped something into her drink,” Madelyn said. “He just had that look about him. He kept trying to get her to go up the slide backwards. And really, what kind of parent lets their kid drink something with blue dye?”
The Johnsons’ fears that their daughter was irreversibly altered went unfounded when Pearl woke up the next morning demanding a lemon biscotti with milk and then flung her breakfast across the room because the two items were touching. She then screamed until everyone in the house started crying, including the dog.
“She’s back to normal, that’s for sure,” Patrick said during a follow-up interview. “We have begun to wonder, heh heh, what exactly that kid gave her. Not that we would drug our kid or anything. It’s purely a passing curiosity, you know.”
The parents of the blue-mustachioed kid could not be reached for comment and no formal charges have been filed.
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About the Author
Joelle Wisler is a writer and mom living in the mountains who loves quiet Saturday mornings and other mythical things like personal space and time to think. She named her blog Running From Mountain Lions so that if she ever meets up with a big cat, at least she can go down in a blaze of irony. Her writing has been flung haphazardly about the internet, but she writes regularly for Scary Mommy and The Huffington Post. She made The Today Show’s List of Funniest Parents on Facebook and contributed to the anthology Scary Mommy’s Guide To Surviving The Holidays. Find her on Facebook and Twitter.