Humility Should Remain in My Bag of Tricks

My son is three and beginning to really push his boundaries. There are moments when I'm not sure his actions are that of a learning child and need to be corrected in a patient way or if he's just being a little pain and choosing to misbehave in which case discipline is necessary. So when days roll around where things are consistently going well, I tend to get too comfortable in my abilities to parent flawlessly.
Today's scheduled started off at a birthday party. I already had the swimming gear packed since the invite said there would be a pool available for the kids. Ten points to me. We were the first family to arrive, so my son was able to hang with the birthday girl for a little bit before being bombarded by six or seven other children. Another ten points since my son tends to act shy if too many kids are around causing a ruckus. No fights with other children. No incidents requiring medical attention. No accidents in the swim trunks. Let's just hand over another 50 points because it was an incredibly successful party experience:

After a rather successful nap (there's another set of points), we headed to the opening of a new, local library. The goal: getting my son his first library card. Again, objective achieved:

And since I'm promoting literacy with my kid, I was feeling like the best mom on the face of the planet. I actually even believed I was being rewarded for all the awesome parenting I was doing when my husband and son were interviewed for the local news station regarding the library. (I'd like to put the link in to the video if I ever find it.) That's right. I was all sorts of patting myself on the back. I had even intended taking pics of my son using his card to check out his books.

It was at this moment of smug satisfaction that I totally nailed down this parenting thing that my son walked up to me with the front of his shorts drenched in pee. Yep, the gods don't like hubris my friends. My child was so excited and distracted with all the festivity at the library that his bladder rebelled and we had our first public accident. That ended our library visit, we were about to leave anyway, and caused a new problem: how NOT to get urine all over my husband's new car's seats in order to get home.

Many people might ask why I didn't keep a change of clothes with me, and up until VERY recently I always had. This time I was convinced I had this parenting thing down, and my instinct told me extra clothes were not necessary for our quick trip to the new library.

Even though I still consider today a large success and tons of fun, lesson learned.