I think I might have ADD, but -- hey, a squirrel!

Okay, lame joke. And possibly offensive, except that I actually do have ADD and therefore feel like I'm entitled to a few jokes on the subject. Usually it's not that big a deal, except for nights like tonight, when I go to the grocery to pick up a few things and don't realize until the cashier has scanned my wine and ice cream and baby wipes and tomatoes that I don't have my wallet. Because it's in my bag. At my house. Gaaaaah. Luckily I live about five minutes from the store, but still. The whole debacle resulted in a grocery trip plus medicinal Starbucks after-trip that ate up an entire hour of my life. The M&M blast blondie was almost worth it, but not quite.

Pretend this is a cute segue

I signed up for this local playgroup message board a few months ago. I'm not sure why, other than I guess I like the idea of a playgroup. I probably should've known this was not my style of playgroup when the lead mom repeatedly referred to the members getting together to "share our most precious possessions...our children!" But I've been trying to give it a fair shot, despite rolling my eyes at their slightly over the top momthusiasm. They keep planning playdates only for 11 AM - 1 PM on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays and then reminding everyone that we have to participate at least once a month to stay in the group. I replied to one of the reminder posts with a note that I supposed we'd be booted out of the group since I am always at work at those times, and the lead mom was nice enough to book a playdate for Monday morning. So of course I said we'd go, even though it was at a local version of Pump It Up, which I fully expected to be on par with Clara's recent Chuck E Cheese experience. Then all the playgroup people bailed on going, but I had psyched myself up for it and thought Nico might really like it, so we went anyway. (Are you laughing at me? I can hear you laughing.)

It wasn't circle-of-hell bad, though it was at this random murder-van warehouse in the middle of an industrial park out in BFE with no official signs or anything. And come to think of it, it was pretty hot in there with all the motors running on the inflatables. Really, though, not as bad as expected. I was on my guard against other people's shithead kids since a friend of mine had posted on facebook about two ridiculous encounters with other people's kids just this past weekend alone, but that also went better than expected. At one point, Nico was playing with these three random balls he'd found lying in the middle of the floor and an older toddler came up and took one of them right out of his hand. My poor sheltered solo-childcare-flyer only child, he literally watched the little boy walk up and looked curiously at his own hand as the child removed the ball from his grasp. Then the other kid took off and Nico pointed after him incredulously and shouted, "Ball?" Before I could think of what to say, the child's mother hustled him back over and made him return the pilfered item, informing him that "We do not take toys away." Mental high five, other mom! Later on a bossy little shithead kid did steal one of the balls while I was tossing them to Nico and ran around with it (not even playing with it, just carrying it around with him), but since we already had two, I decided to let that one go. I did keep my eye on that kid after that, though.

Oh, and the reason we were playing with balls at a bouncy place? Nico wanted nothing to do with the inflatables. I tried putting him in the special toddlers-only one and as soon as his feet touched it, he was all "What the blue hell is this nonsense?" and "This surface does not seem very stable, mother." He was obviously curious about the bigger slide thing they had, but every time I offered to help him climb it, he flipped out. Now I have an excuse not to go to bouncy houses for at least a few more months. I'll call that one a win, I think, even though I did pay $6 for my kid to spend 45 minutes throwing miniature foursquare balls and crawling through a plastic Little Tykes house. But hey! He did it in the presence of other children, so I can count it as social experience, right?

Wait just a minute, who is that grown-ass child wearing my son's clothes?