17:40 Sunday, May 05 2006

attack of the soccer moms

I took David down to the park with his bike this afternoon, after lunch. He was doing his normal thing, driving around and 'parking' in between each junglegym & slide. As he was climbing off one of the gyms, I looked for his bike, and noticed that it wasn't there. I scanned the playground, and noticed that this little girl was riding it towards the water fountains, with a woman following behind her that I assumed was her mother. I ran over to the lady, asked her if this girl was her child, and then told her that her kid needs to get off the bike now. Her mother seemed to be horrified that I was ordering her child off of David's bike. She gave me some ludicrous story about how she just wanted to see how well her child could ride it. I repeated, get off the bike now. She yanked the kid off, and gave me this dirty look. Thankfully, David was unphased by all of this, climbed on, and announced that he wanted to watch the skateboarders. So we're heading off towards the skate park, and this psycho-soccer-mom comes running over again, and starts yapping about how she's sorry and just wanted to see how her kid could ride the bike. I looked her in the eye, and told her in a very firm voice, next time you should ask if you want to borrow something, not just take it. It just boggles my mind. Why would anyone think that it was ok to just take something that wasn't their's? Does that mean if I like someone else's car, I can just 'borrow' it to see what its like to drive? Why did I need to give a lesson in common courtesy to someone who looked older than me? Anyway, as we're leaving the playground, some other random soccer-mom decides that its time to butt in, and comments "I guess you don't come to the playground very often". I'm not sure what exactly that was supposed to mean, other than perhaps random kids taking other kids' toys without asking is a common occurance, and that I shouldn't have been surprised/upset/miffed by it. Whatever, I ignored her comment, and just kept going with David.
When we got to the skate park area, there were no skateboarders there at all (most likely because it was rather hot, 87F at the moment), and David was a little dispointed. Then he asked me if he could ride his bike in the skate park, and I figured why not. So he was driving up and down the big ramps, and into the bowls (he called them holes). He had alot of fun.
Denise made me (and David) a huge vegetable lasagna today. Ingredients were: pasta sauce, lasagna noodles, shredded carrots, 1 red pepper (diced), 1 diced tomato, 1 diced onion, 1 pound of firm tofu (finely diced), 2lbs of mushrooms (sliced), 3Tbs of olive oil, and a little shredded mozarella on top. We'll be eating it for dinner over the course of the week.