Singing Saturday
This morning, the kids and I went to McDonald’s – again – for our fun, air conditioned time. My friend, uh… Blaire… called me earlier in the week to set up a playdate, so we agreed to meet up at the Mickey D’s with our children. Well, she has only one girl who turns five early next year whose name is… uh, Karen.
I’ve never been on a playdate before. It’s not like being on a romantic date. We ate Egg McMuffins and drank coffee while keeping the children under control and their voices down. We sat at the Play Land™ tables, and the children ran up and down the huge plastic tubes. Ty and Karen came down after a while and told me that Taylor was eating garbage. Garbage? Ugh. I climbed in the tubes to catch Taylor. There was more space to crawl from the last time I was in there – of course, I was eight and a half months preggs that time, and Kyle had gotten lost up there. In the middle of one tube, Taylor was spitting out some pecans that some nasty mother’s nasty kid had left behind. Plastic eating utensils were strewn all over the place. Good grief. I asked Ty to get me some napkins. Waiting for him was a complete disaster: A new child’s face kept appearing, followed by its small body, squeezing itself between me and the side of the tube. I kept hold of Taylor’s hand so that she wouldn’t get away; I had to clean her face, too. I was finally delivered the napkins and did a quick clean-up of the area. I thought it would be a good idea to clean-up any other garbage in the tubes. I felt like roughage. Gross. I went down the slide and threw the garbage away. Playdates are nothing like romantic dates.
I don’t think we’ll be visiting McDonald’s anytime soon.
Karen started getting tired, so Blair said that they were going to go. Someone said something about a park, and I heard a great commotion of whoops and hoorays. Huh? It’s past noon! I’m not going to any park!
After picking up bottles of water at the house, we arrived at the park before 12:30pm. No sign of Blair and Karen, so I thought that they might have needed directions. She called me to tell me that Karen decided to stay at the house when they went to pick up water. It must be nice blowing people off. She sounded pretty unbothered by it. Then again, she probably feels the deepest guilt. It burns her throat. But maybe not. You’d think that people know their kids enough to anticipate a need for a rest. I can understand the fear of a tantrum at the park. I can’t understand agreeing to something that you have no intention of fulfilling.
ANYway….. Ty quickly acquainted himself with a group of older children who were trying to spin on some slanted spinning circle. He later played in the sand, pretending to be a bulldozer. Then he made a forest of twigs and leaves and pretend that a pebble was a car. Kyle and Taylor rode the tri-seesaw. I couldn’t sit on the third end because I would have put everyone off balance. So I sat on the center platform and swayed the crazy thing back and forth. Kyle pretended to be Link riding Epona. Taylor started singing “The Wells Fargo Wagon.” So the three of us sang.
And sang.
We sang seven the songs from The Music Man. We sang “Do-Re-Mi.” The other kids in the playground were looking at us, smiling. Parents were staring at us. But I sing well, so I know that their staring was not because we sounded bad.
We sang the Little Einsteins theme. Some kids were trying to sing along. We sang it again, but I sang the “dum daddle dum” parts of the orchestra. We got tired of singing and sat on the benches. Kids didn’t stop coming up to us, smiling, waving, asking for autographs (just kidding!), and trying to be friendly in general. Next time we go to the park, we’ll take our musical instruments and put on a concert.
