Yesterday we had an impressive thunderstorm. The light became eerily golden, the trees were alive with wind, and bursts of rain built into a heavy downpour.
My son put on his shoes and announced he was going to go outside and play in the rain.
My abrupt “No” brought him up short. (You have to be abrupt if you want to catch him before he’s out of earshot; the little bugger moves fast.)
“There’s lightning,” I explained, once I had made sure he wouldn’t be out the door by the second word. “If it were just the rain, I’d say go nuts, but you’re not going to play outside in a thunderstorm.”
He spent the next five minutes explaining to me the statistics of lightning strikes. “You’ve got a better chance of being eaten by a shark while swimming in the ocean than you do of getting struck by lightning.”
I would not relent, and he eventually gave up and sulked back to his room. I’m a very unreasonable parent, I really am.