I received this story from wifey. It made the news last week, I suppose because of the amount of work involved to repair the damage caused by one mother’s failure to watch her toddler. It seems that a little boy spotted the pretty pile of colored sand on the floor of the vast hall and, slipping under a protective rope, danced all over it, ruining the creation of eight Tibetan monks who had spent two days cross-legged on the floor of Union Station, meticulously pouring the sand into an intricate design as an expression of their Buddhist faith.

They were more than halfway done with the design - called a mandala - on Tuesday when they ended their work for the day and left. The little boy showed up sometime later with his mother who was taking a package to a post office within the hall. A security tape shows the boy’s mother returning to the mandala, grabbing her son by the arm and walking out of camera range.

The monks, on a year long tour of the United States and Canada to raise money for their Tibetan monastery which had been destroyed, saw the destruction Wednesday and said they would start over. In a ceremony Saturday, they will sweep up the sand design and offer bits to onlookers for their gardens. The rest will be placed in the Missouri River, they say, to carry the blessings all over the planet.

If you’ve ever raised little boys, you know how easily something like this can happen although, in all honesty, Mom should have been watching the little rascal closer. I’d like to think she used the experience as a teaching tool and that both she and the little boy learned a valuable lesson…

Since this embedded CBS News clip is an AOL News link, I’m not sure how long they’ll keep it up. Once they decide to take it down it’s, well, gone.