Mindless Mom

The kids and I walked up to the public library after dinner last night.  Sadly, my son’s three Transfomer books were due back.  That’s too bad…..I won’t be able to read them over and over and over and over and over again until next week when they make their way back on to the bookshelf, where my son can spot them with his eagle eyes again. 

I was secretly hoping that another ”Optimus Prime obsessed” child & his mother would see us dropping them in the book drop and snatch them up for a three week check-out period.  If they returned them late, I’d even be willing to pay up to six months of the 5cent/day fine for them.  People are busy, these things happen.

I regret to inform you that I had no such luck.  Feel free to join us for a bedtime showdown between Optimus Supreme (not to be confused with Optimus Prime) and Megatron next Saturday night at 8:30pm.

Our walk to the library was in a word, social. 

I had the girls in the double stroller and my son was walking in front of us.  We were not even out of the driveway when my middle child decided she wanted to walk “bys hers self”.  My son calmly opted for the chair on wheels and they traded places.  So now I’m pushing my oldest with his dangling legs hanging below the stroller and my youngest leaning out the right side waving to passing cars.  Miss Independent is up front picking up the pace to resemble a light-footed jog.  I follow suit and pick up my own pace.  There are enough of us that the passing traffic probably began to question which organization was hosting a 5k race at 6:30pm.  Watch out for the orange cones! 

About 1/4 of the way into the walk we fall back to a pedestrian pace and pass a man walking his dog.  My son says “hello” and the man responds with a warm “hello”.

“I said hi and he said hi back”, my son shouts back to me over the stroller roof. 

“I know, I heard.  That was nice of you.”

I tell the leader of our group to move to the side as a couple of teenage bikers pass by us. 

“Hi!” my son yells as they whiz by us.

“Hi”, an awkard teenage boy calls back.

I could see my son’s beaming smile from behind his head.  His cheeks were puffed up like a blowfish.  He turned back to me and hollered with excitement “he said hi too!”. 

You know where this is going.  Lucky for us the weather was nice; there were a lot of people out and about. 

For the next twenty minutes of our walk my son said every version of a greeting you can imagine to each oncoming walker, biker, skater, skooter-riding kid, and at one point got so caught up he even turned to his own sister for a response. 

“Hi!”, “How are you?”, “Hello!”,  “Hey there!”, “We’re walking to the library!”, “Hey you!”, “I like your dog!”, “Can I pet your dog?”.  All the while I could tell that he was mentally tallying the responses he got.

Halfway through the greeting madness, my daughter jumped on board.  As the leader of the group, she quickly had a leg up, as the oncoming traffic passed her first.  “Hi”, she’d say followed by a goony giggle. 

My son then upped the anti by skipping the generic salutation and shooting straight with the compliments.  “Those are cool shoes.”  “I like your bike.” “Your dog is cute.”  “Your skooter goes fast.”  All the while flashing his pearly whites.

You would have thought we were walking in a mall we passed so many people.  And I have to give a shout out to the peeps of our community - because each and every single person, no matter the age, responded with a warm and friendly response to all of my children.  Fools. 

3/4 way into the trip I now have the leader of this “mess on wheels” cupping her hands to her mouth as she giggles uncontrollably at each oncoming person and my son throwing out Knock Knock jokes.  The baby of the family caught onto things about 20 feet back and is now shouting out her own “HI” to compete with the hot air flowing from her siblings.  The sheer volume of the three of these kids speaking at the same time made the elderly walkers jump and the animals twitch as they passed us.

By the time we rolled up to the library, my son was practically handing out autographed photos of himself followed by a mimed hand telephone to his ear while mouthing the words “Call me”.  I had turned into the pimp mobile within a block’s time. 

Ok, so he wasn’t handing out photos, but the last guy we passed may have gotten wind of my daughter’s need to use the potty and the color of our living room couch. 

As my son propped open the door to the library and I attempted to maneuver the stroller inside, I reminded them all of the library’s Quiet Rule.  We got through the double door entrance and passed a woman standing at the drinking fountain.  In pure unison all three of my kids shouted “HI!”. 

Looking back……using the outdoor book drop may have been a wiser decision on my part.  Hell, what did I expect?  They had been on a roll.