Tuesday, June 03, 2014

Doing It At The Park

Nyles' fever finally subsided a bit, but it was still too soon to take him back to daycare, so we ventured out to the park. When I go to the park on the weekend, there are usually mommies and daddies standing around half-watching their kids, and half-playing around on their cellphones. It is a chaotic scene for the most part, although my wife likes to scour the park looking for a fellow parent to befriend so they can go back and forth about the rigors of parenthood (she's yet to find a friend, except for once when she thought she found a friend, and then realized she had written this woman's number down incorrectly. She's never seen that woman again, although she feverishly looks for this phantom woman every time we re-visit the park. I digress..)

The weekday scene at the park was quite different as you can imagine. There were two fathers (present company excluded) who were either stay-at-home dads or on vacation, but they mainly talked to each other, while carrying their infants in a pouch. There were two mothers sitting on a bench near me talking about the advantages and disadvantages of shaving their pubic hair (totally park-appropriate conversation by the way), and the rest of the 20 women at this park were clearly nannies. If I had to do a Harold Lederman-type breakdown on the racial demographics they would look like this: 50% African, 40% Hispanic, 10% Russian. They all sat in a group talking about various topics (they did NOT discuss pubic hair), and they all managed to keep a watchful on the kids that weren't theirs. It was an amazing display of racial harmony among with the women, and they even watched out for Nyles the few times (ok 100 times) he tried to take toys or balls away from the other children.

On several occasions, I caught the nannies trying to make eye contact with me, so they could engage in b.s. conversation (how old is your son? where does he go to school? When's his birthday? Is that a cyst on the back of his head? Do you live around here?), and I did a masterful job at evading each and every one of their advances. My wife and I are a team..she does the talking, I do the mean mugging from afar, and any attempts at switching the roles will fall flat. I suppose I should have stepped up and sat in the chatty chair for once, but I opted to stick with the mean mugging, while peppering in some fake discipline of Nyles when all my other tactics to run away failed. It was quite an operation I had going.

Thankfully, Nyles seems to be healthy, so he can go back to school tomorrow. Me on the other hand? I've been feeling like I have to vomit for 4 hours now, so I may be home alone.

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