Donna had a meeting she wanted to go to this afternoon, so I left work a little early to meet her there and do a "car swap" so that I could take the girls for the evening. I took them to Chick-Fil-A for dinner.
The dinner experience was OK, but neither Amanda nor Elena ate much. They were both wiggly (Amanda especially). In fact, I vetoed ice cream because they ate so little. Their wiggliness was harder for me to cope with because I had such a lousy day at work today.
But it wasn't until when we went to the play area in Chick-Fil-A that I became really uncomfortable as a parent.
This batch of kids' parents apparently did not think it was necessary to be in the room with them while they played. This surprises me every time, since I always want to be in there to make sure my children behave themselves and are not accosted by other children.
I should have been warned-off by the spilled orange juice on the bench as a walked in, presumably created by a non-supervised child who didn't feel like, and wasn't told, to clean it up. I would have cleaned it up myself, but it would have meant leaving the area to go get napkins, which I wasn't willing to do. So I just let it sit there until a child came up and took an interest in the small, orange puddle. She started blowing on it, making the puddle move about the bench, increasing its area of influence. I told her not to do that, and she stopped.
I always am careful not to intervene with other parents' kids when they have not given me explicit authority to control them. So I sat quietly while a few kids started yelling "Daaaaa Daaaaaa!" at the top of their lungs. It was unpleasantly loud. As a few were watching me while they did this, I think they were seeing if I would say something to them. I didn't, but they stopped quickly enough.
During the entire time I was there, the sole adult in a room of about 10 kids, there was one child who was playing pleasantly enough but had a balloon in his mouth. Sometimes he would stop to blow it up, then take it out and let it go. But most of the time it was sitting limply in his mouth while he ran around the play area. I never saw or knew who his parents were, but I guess they were not too worried about his dying by choking. He was alive when I left at any rate.
But the most disturbing behavior of one of the parentless children was one little boy, who was four, very talkative, and asked everyone what their name was. At one point, I saw him sitting on the ground next to a boy about his same age (maybe younger) who was lying on his back. He started slapping the younger boy in the tummy, and when the younger boy protected his tummy, he would slap his chest. I did indeed tell him I didn't think hitting was a good idea. He perhaps paused a moment before moving on to punching and poking. This apparently did not elicit the response he was looking for, so he grabbed the little boy's wrist and squeezed as tightly as he could. That got a wail of pain out of the younger boy.
At this, the father of the younger boy entered. He was not speaking English, so I did not know what he was saying, but he picked up the younger boy to comfort him. He then started talking to the four year old. At this point I decide they are brothers, which may explain the desire to cause injury to his younger sibling. By the older brother's reaction, though, I can tell he was not being disciplined. I suppose the father did not know the reason the younger brother was crying. He didn't ask me, previously the only adult in the room.
I told my girls that we were leaving then. By the time they got on their shoes, the wrist-squeezing boy was back in the play area, outwardly being a friendly, sweet child. I knew otherwise, and left as promptly as possible.