Park Life

I'm going to be completely honest here: the park is boring. The only time the park isn't boring is when you're 1 until 12 and the againa starting at 14 to 16, when you steal a bottle of Ouzo from your parents and get wasted with your other stupid teenage friends. Yes, it's sweet and cute to see your little one run around and go down the slide and giggle, but it's got a pretty short entertainment window, for me anyhow. I'm pretty much over the park in 10 minutes, so I do my best to entertain myself my striking up conversation with others. Sometimes it's well received, other times I'm given the major cold shoulder. That usually happens in the posh parks like the one in the Beaches. I was at the park the other day with Dex and started talking to this dude who had a SUPER cute little baby girl. Turns out he moved from Sudan 10 months ago. He was pretty interesting and we had a nice conversation. It got weird when he scratched my back as he said goodbye. I mean a real scratch, not like an accidental swipe of the finger. I was wearing a tank top and he put all five finger nails on me and gave me a quick back scratch. Under normal circumstances, I welcome a back scratch from just about anyone, but this one seemed oddly misplaced. A back scratch from a dude you just met at the park? Am I being too judgemental?
I was sitting around a sandbox last week and there were about 6 toddlers playing in it, which meant there were 6 adults sitting around it. We just sat and stared at the kids and no one said anything. Here's the thing:if you took those kids out of the equation, and it was just 6 adults, would we try to find something to talk about or is the sandbox like the playground equivalent of the bus? Just look forward and make sure your kid doesn't bite someone. As you may be able to tell by the verbose nature of these blogs, silence makes me uncomfortable. I then am wracking my brain to think of something to say to someone but the trick is to not make it about the kids, or about being a parent. So then I ask some dude about what he does for a living and now I feel like I'm hitting on him at the sandbox. Fuck. That wasn't my intention but now everyone is listening and he feels the need to answer me. So he does. And doesn't continue the conversation. So now all I've done is blurted out some question to a stranger, which he politely answered, and we all continue to just stare in the middle of the sandbox.
That, however, is preferable to listening to some annoying people talking about, or putting into practice, their stupid parenting techniques which I find so nauseating.
Dex was going down this baby slide. He was hanging around the bottom of it when some other little girl was about to go down. Her Dad said, "Char Char, wait for the little boy to move." I'm going to assume her name was Charlotte. Dex moved about a second later, so I wouldn't necessarily say that she waited, it just worked out that he got out of the way. She goes down the slide and the Dad says, "Char Char, come over here.Char Char, Daddy is so proud of you! Daddy is so so so proud of you."
Oh my god disgusting. She's effing 1 1/2, she doesn't give a shit dude and seriously? You're proud of that? If she were to start speaking Yiddish and tap dancing, then ya, you can tell her you're "so so so proud" of her. This is the reason that there are so many effing entitled young adults out there who think that because they wake up in the morning, they should be given a gold medal. I'm certainly not against encouraging your kids, and telling them how proud you are of them, but lets make sure it's something worth being proud of shall we? Waiting for someone to get out of the way is not an accomplishment. What happens when Char Char graduates from College? This dude is going to lose his mind. I can just see him in the audience, uncontrollably sobbing, snot running down his face while he screams, "CHAR CHARR. I AM SO SO SO PROUD OF YOU! OOHHHH CHAR CHAR." She'll grab her degree from DeVry and trip off the stage.