It's probably my fault really. I didn't want to cook anything for lunch so we went to McDonalds for a 'cheeburger'. I decided the we could stop and play in the playland today too. In this town I realize it is risking pink eye and myriad other communicable diseases but it is also the divorced single dad mecca of the world on Sunday morning. Supposed to be anyway.
We go inside and belly up to the counter. I order a cheeseburger happy meal. The guy looks at me and says, "what?" like he'd never heard of a happy meal which can't possibly be since he was a toy shy of one. I asked again for a cheeseburger happy meal with a chocolate milk. He is quiet and doesn't move for an uncomfortable amount of time. I worried that I might be getting dive bombed by bees (in January). The he looks at me (with my daughter right next to me dressed like this only wingless)
and he asks me if I want a girl or boy toy in the happy meal. I almost . . . almost said, "really!?" but I am still practicing using filters so I said, "a girl toy please." Then I asked for a number one with a Dr. Pepper with no ice. He said, "A Dr. Pepper with what?" In my mind I am thinking NO ICE, NO ICE, NO ICE! I said, "no ice." Which doesn't matter anyway since I fill the cup myself. He asks for my name. Keep in mind I am the only customer at the counter at this point. He writes my name (spells it Krystal) on my receipt. He assembles the happy meal, puts the chocolate milk on the tray. He assembles the number one meal then looks at me straight in the face and yells across the lobby "Crystal?" Again, I filtered out, "REALLY?!" I took the meal and headed over to the drink station. I peek through the window of the play land to see if there are any tables and there are not. Tables full of cute little families with 2 or 3 kids each. I tell Xyla that we will eat first then go in and play.
She was doing so good up until this point. She sat quietly, she didn't want to eat. Which is impossible because she was definitely hungry. A little boy sitting one table away is smiling at her trying to make her smile. She starts getting grumpy. I presume because some little boy she didn't know was staring at her. Finally she eats about half of the burger and a few fries. That is a win as far as I am concerned. I look over into the play land to see if any of the tables had cleared out. The little boy was digging through two happy meal boxes that one of the 'cute little families' left behind. (They were not so cute anymore, that's just rude.)
The girl who looks far too young to be the mother of this child, but could have been, is watching japanese animae on her laptop. I am reading the words as they are going by and realize two boys are about to . . . well, lets just say I was looking for a way to get my stuff together quickly and get Xyla in the other room. I try to get the girl's attention to let her know that her ward is digging through someone else's trash. It takes four tries for me to finally get her attention. That's when I looked at what was on her tray. Breakfast wrappers. It was nearly 1:00 p.m. by then. They had been there since at least 11:30 (that's when they switch from breakfast to lunch here). I tell her that he is scavanging and she gets up and goes in to get him.
She sits him down on the chair beside her a proceeds to ignore him in favor of her animae show. I finally get all of our stuff gathered up and we go into the play land. By this time there is only one family left in there. Three or four adults and about 4 kids altogether. They start to gather their things and their kids to leave. Xyla gets about three turns up in the play land tube and gets lost. She starts crying because she can't find the slide. She adores the slide. Without even asking one of the adults heads up the tube after her. While I am grateful, I really wish he would have let me go up after her. The only thing that makes getting lost scarier is having a stranger grab ahold of you and tell you where to go. She was genuinely scared when she finally made it down the slide.
I held her until everyone else left. Then the little boy appears out of nowhere and decides he wants to chat. Apparently he is there with his sister because his parents were of dumpster diving somewhere. What's more disturbing is not that they have to dumpster dive it's that they do it often enough their three year old knows what it means. I kept an eye on the sister because she clearly did not realize that he had left her side again. I kept a mental note of how long it took her to realize he was gone. He was in there a good 15 minutes before she even looked up from her show. Do you know what can happen to a kid in 15 minutes? I am scared for this little boy. He's congenial, he's adorable, he can slip away unnoticed.
He is really lucky that a bad person didn't show up there today. Finally she looks up from her show and panics for two seconds and looks out into the play land. She looks back at her show, she didn't even locate him before she decided the computer was more important. She didn't get up. She didn't come looking for him. She looked up again. I signaled to her that he was in my eyesight and that he was ok. It is not my responsibility to watch him but I wasn't going to leave until they did. Clearly, she was not going to make sure he was safe.
More kids and another family show up. The boys roughhousing made Xyla nervous but she was all about going down the slide at this point and she wasn't going to let some noisy boys get to her. Finally the girl packed up her laptop and called to the boy so I gathered my things too. It took me a bit of time to get Xyla out of the tube because I made the mistake of telling her it was time to go. Mental note: never say that to a kid at the top of the tube. I kept telling her to come down, she kept saying, "I can't come down." I said, "yes you can." One of the older boys volunteered to go up after her. She finally came down. I had to juggle her, the rest of her happy meal and my drink out the door. She fussed and started to cry, I told her that doesn't work on mommy, she needed to remember that. She stopped crying. We got in the car and went to Old Navy to bum around and came home with the fairy wings.
We had kind of an interesting day.
