so, we teach our boys that we help people. and we do. anytime we can. but how do you teach your kid that we need to help others but that it’s not always safe to accept help from others? today, we had a very long trip home from alabama. when we got home, the boys were tired and hungry and the turkey had to pee. hubby and were both loaded down with baggage. it was a mad dash to get home and get back to normal. the elevator stopped a floor before ours and a little boy, not much older than the turkey, got on by himself. hubby and i exchanged an “oh-my-goodness-what-are-his-parents-thinking” look. he got off on our floor and by the time we got all of our stuff out of the elevator, he was back from the unit he had gone to and he was visibly upset. we asked and he said nobody was answering at the door. we asked him if he wanted to come home with us so that we could help him find his mom. yes, i know that the right thing would have been to not put him in a position where he needed to come into our home but, as i said, we were heavily laden and not thinking of anything more than getting our boys home and getting him help. he didn’t even hesitate to accept our help which immediately rang warning bells in my head because our boys wouldn’t either. and while we knew we were truly there to help him… who else might he have gone off with that wouldn’t have been so nice? and my boys would too. in a heartbeat. because we teach them the value of helping. *sigh* so we brought him home and he calmed down while playing with the boys and hubby called our security service to let them know we had found a lost boy. fortunately, his mom had already contacted them so it didn’t take long for her to come up and retrieve her son. they both cried their eyes out in our foyer and i cried thinking of all the ways that things could have gone wrong for this little boy (today is his 6th birthday) and how easy it would have been for it to be my boy instead. they were on the crowded elevator together and he ran off of it before she could grab him. i’ve had that fear every single time i’ve gotten on or off the elevators with my boys… how easy it would be for one of them to slip away from me at the very last second. so we started drilling the turkey about what to do if we get separated in the building here. and we’ll continue to drill it into him, along with other safety plans. he needs to memorize one of our phone numbers… this poor boy didn’t even know how to reach his mom. but how do we not scare him to death? how do we not ruin his innocence with worries about “bad people”? how do we tell him that we should always help but he needs to say “no. thank you.” if someone wants to bring him home to help? i want to go apologize to his mother for how worried she must have been about him coming home with strangers. i want to apologize for being so quick to judgement when we saw him alone on the elevator. and i want to let her know how terrified i was for his safety, like he was my own.