Love muffins, how many times have you changed your mind last minute about going to a party? How many times have you been invited to something and it conflicted with something else you already had going on?
Parents of 5-year-old Alex Nash were in complete shock when they received an invoice in their son’s backpack after he skipped his classmate’s birthday party in order to spend the day with his family.
Here’s what went down:
The 5-year-old schoolboy from Torpoint in Cornwall, England, was invited to a friend’s celebration on Dec. 20 at the Ski Slope and Snowboard Centre in Devon. While he initially told his parents he wanted to go, they realized that it would overlap with a planned visit with Alex’s grandparents.
Alex’s parents, Derek Nash and Tanya Walsh, told him he could either choose to attend the party or continue with the family’s visit to his grandparents’ home. He chose to spend the day with his family, they said.
That’s when the trouble started – Nash told the Plymouth Herald that they had no way of contacting the birthday boy’s mother, Jennifer Lawrence, to tell her that Alex would not be attending the party.
Because school was then on a break for the holidays, the parents claim that Alex had no other way of reaching out to his friend’s family.
Then, on Jan. 15, after classes resumed, Alex returned home from school with an invoice for a £15.95 ($24.13) “Child’s Party No-Show Fee” from Lawrence.
Nash said he confronted Lawrence about the fee, telling her that they would not be paying. Walsh also claims that she reached out to Lawrence through Facebook to try to settle the issue amicably.
Lawrence told the BBC that she had provided her phone number on the party invites she had sent home. “They had every detail needed to contact me,” she said.
Now, Nash claims that Lawrence has threatened to take him to small claims court, and Alex has said that his classmates will no longer play with him after he skipped the party.
“I can understand that she’s upset about losing money,” Nash told the BBC. “The money isn’t the issue, it’s the way she went about trying to get the money from me.”
“She treated me like a child,” he continued, “and that I should do what she says.”
Baby, those parents had the right ones that day — because there’s not a person in the world who could ever charge us for where we take or don’t take OUR child!
The audacity.
[via People]
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