Alicia is the funny and multi-talented blogger from Naps Happen and The Frazzled Foodie. If you haven’t checked out her blogs, do. Her kids are apparently narcoleptic (although she denies this) and she takes pictures of their various naps for (can you guess?) Naps Happen. These aren’t minor league cute nappers, like my kids who are adorable but generally in the vicinity of their beds. This is the majors: sleeping on stairs, buried under couch cushions, sprawled amidst toys on a hardwood floor, face-planted at the table. I defy you to look at these pictures and not crack a smile. With The Frazzled Foodie, she admirably maintains her passion for cooking and shares highly personalized recipes and stories of life as a mom of two (possibly narcoleptic) boys.
Why am I talking about Alicia so much? Because she has written a guest post for me. My first ever guest post! Here she paints a picture of a typical day in the life. This happens to be a WTF day. The kind of day we’ve all had where we wonder, how did I get here? How did this happen to me?
My special room in hell has been reserved. After weeks of poor weather, canceled preschool, and cabin fever, I am desperate to find a place for my four-year-old and my two-year-old to work off some boyish energy. I have brought my children to a McDonald’s Playland.
We are not McDonald’s people. William and Cormac do not ask us for fries or cheeseburgers. They do not know what a happy meal is. Neither of them actually recognizes Ronald McDonald, although I have read that he is more widely known among America’s children than Jesus. What my boys do recognize, however, is a big slide. What they are immediately drawn to is the impressive two-story network of multi-colored tunnels and plexiglass bubbles that fill this greasy-smelling room. Forget the Chicken McNuggets – these boys are ready to rumble.
They are, of course, not the only children who are going crazy for the indoor jungle gym. Roughly ten other children ranging in age from about two to seven are crawling all over the tubing like insects. Their screams echo off the walls of this amazingly acoustic, glassed-in cell like crazed fans at a high school basketball game. Out of the corner of my eye, I see an eleventh child come streaking out of the family bathroom in the corner. His mother chases angrily after him waving a wet wipe and saying something about hand washing.
I seat myself at one of the cleaner tables arrayed in front of the jungle gym, gingerly arranging the Happy Meal I’ve purchased for the boys and putting the straw into my mammoth Diet Coke. I scan the table to ensure I’m not about to rest my elbow in a pool of ketchup. The coast is clear.
William and Cormac have no interest in our Happy Meal, despite the masculine toy it contains: a red truck with stickers you can apply yourself. William has scaled the levels of the jungle gym with impressive speed and is already running back and forth in the tunnels at the uppermost levels, shouting unintelligible messages at me through the clear plastic bubbles that connect the tubes. He looks like an inmate at a hamster farm. Cormac is a little slower, which is understandable considering he is not even supposed to be in the playland until he’s three-years-old. Undeterred by his insufficient stature, he figures out how to shove his foot into the netting that forms the jungle gym walls, vaulting himself up to the next level each time. A woman behind me comments to her companion that she can’t believe that baby is making it all the way to the top. I briefly reconsider my choice to let him play there and wonder if I get an even more special room in hell for parents who let their babies break their necks at McDonald’s.
Most of the parents are hardly paying any attention to their kids, which is why nobody has noticed a four-year-old boy who is lying on the floor under the jungle gym stairs, eating a chicken nugget that was lying on the floor. The two women next to me have babies with them and are gossiping scandalously. Every so often a little girl with pigtails runs up to their table for a sip from her juice box.
An older woman in the corner is one of the few adults focused on the children in the gym. She is laughing at their antics and looks far less stressed-out than the younger parents in the room. Catching my glance, she nods at Cormac, who has managed to take his chocolate milk into the play gym with him and is running back and forth in one of the tunnels. “Just wait until you’re a grandparent,” she says. “It’s much better.” I roll my eyes in appreciation and liken my children to monkeys. She chortles appreciatively and tells me that William is a charmer.
My gaze is drawn to a table across the room. A girl who appears to be about five-years-old has come running to her mother, bawling. One look at her and I can tell why. She has wet herself and the entire crotch and inside legs of her pants are soaked. Her mother pats ridiculously at her legs with a stack of napkins and hastily begins packing up to leave. The girl is inconsolable, as if someone else wet her pants for her, without her permission.
I turn my eyes back to the play gym just in time to see Cormac have his own catastrophe. He runs toward the window of the plexiglass bubble in the center of the play gym and trips. As if it is happening in slow motion, I see his chocolate milk slide down the front of the bubble and leak out the bottom, dripping outside the gym and onto the floor. His lower lip trembles and I see his mouth form the sad words, “Sorry Mamaaaaaa…..” I am aware that nearly every parent in the room is looking at me. I grab a pack of baby wipes from my purse and crawl inside the bubble, uttering soothing words to Cormac and furiously working to wipe up the mess. He is somewhat consoled and exits the bubble with me, where I use another wipe to clean the floor under the gym. I turn to face my audience of parents and theatrically shrug my shoulders. One or two smile sympathetically. The rest are stone-faced.
As I sit down again at my table and hand Cormac a slice of apple from his Happy Meal, William comes running up. He has just come down the slide. “Mommy, my pants and my socks are wet.” With horror, I realize that the slide was the last location used by the girl who had peed herself moments ago. The girl is long gone but her presence is still being felt at the McDonald’s Playland, perhaps by several more children who are about to go down the slide.
