Breakfast in America

If you move to Denver, at some point you'll go to the Cherry Creek Mall. There you'll find a pretty cool children's play area with huge breakfast items - fried eggs, bacon, cereal, banana slices, and strawberries - that kids can climb on, run around, and generally burn off a lot of energy playing amid.

Since we moved to Denver before Jack was even a gleam in his Daddy's eye, so to speak, my first, second, and most subsequent trips to the Mall where I encountered the little playland had me giving it the "Huh, that's kind of cool," look, and then quickly moving on before one of the little buggers running around like a crazed hyena struck me as cute enough to actually want to have one of my own. Throw in the fact that I hate malls anyway and generally run through them as fast as possible so as to be in and out and on my way before inadvertently purchasing a two thousand dollar leather chair at Pottery Barn, and it's not surprising I hadn't really given the play area a second thought. Until recently.

Because Jack loves to climb on things. The dog, our couch, our back stairs, his play table, you name it. He also loves breakfast. If he ate as much food at his other meals as he often eats at breakfast, he'd, well, he'd be really big. So today I decided to put aside my aversion to malls, wheel Jack's umbrella stroller from West Parking Deck 4 - the best place to park to more or less avoid the mass of traffic crawling through the parking garage that is part of why the mall experience is so dismal to begin with - to the play area, unstrap him, carry him to the spot that looked to be the least overrun by other (and bigger) kids, and turn him loose.

It was pretty funny. For about a minute or two he sort of knelt in one spot, just gazing around, kind of awestruck. I'm not sure if he immediately registered things like, wow, that's one big slice of banana, or MAN that's a lot of syrup on that freakishly huge waffle, or was (most likely) primarily fascinated by all the other kids. There certainly were a lot of them, ranging in age from probably a year old to 3 or 4, most of them moving faster than I personally had moved since either college or getting up from my desk after Emily called to say her water broke. Jack was fascinated; I was fascinated. It was like a toddler convention, surrounded by a wall of parents talking on their cell phones, leafing through magazines, or like me, unable to take their eyes of their young'un for fear he'd get swept up in a wave of galloping children and totally disappear.

Finally he crawled over to a big strawberry and pulled himself up to standing against it. Looked back, saw that I was still there, smiled, and then crawled over to a banana slice. Pulled himself up on it. Looked around some more. Saw I was still there. Went over to the huge bowl of cereal. Did the same thing. There were a lot of bigger kids there, and I could visualize a future injury to the somewhat less physically stable Jack, so after a minute I went over near him. He saw me, and immediately crawled over to be picked up. That was nice.

Then we went to one of the big waffles, and I sat on the edge while he crawled up onto it. A little smile of accomplishment. From him; I've been sitting successfully for years. Ba-dum-Bump! Sorry.

At one point I backed over to the edge where another parent, a Mom, complimented Jack - "He's very cute," to which I managed to respond "Thank you," rather than "I know!" and then her girl came running over and tackled her, and I watched Jack crawl off the waffle in the direction of three huge links of sausage. Feeling good that he at least started out at the strawberry, I went over and helped him try to climb up. It was a little high; he'd get one leg up but couldn't get the other one up, which was just as well anyway since if he'd gotten onto it he might well have fallen off the other side, you know, had I not been there to catch him. But of course I was.

And then he was done, and he reached up to be picked up, and it was back into the stroller and back to the car and back to the house and now he's sleeping and hopefully, hopefully dreaming of slices of banana - because he loves banana slices at breakfast - that he can keep on eating and they'll never go away.