Come as you are

img028, originally uploaded by pwilnyc.

Spent some time sur le mal today. I mean "at the mall," but "sur le mal" cracks me up. I never said I wasn't pretentious, right? Leave me be, it wasn't fun.

For instance, I think that anyone who walks into Abercrombie & Fitch should be tackled and the HPV vaccine forced upon them.

Also, I now know it's Hollister's fault that so many tweens think that a bikini top is an acceptable substitute for a shirt.

But what tore it was our experience in the usually soporific TinyTown, the walled-in, no-sharp-edges play area in the basement of our mall. School's out for the week, and it was unusually crowded. There were some bigger kids there, none over seven I'd say, all older siblings of the littlies that were crawling all over. Typically this kind of older kid is extra-considerate of little kids, since all his life mom has been yelling, "Watch out for your little sister!" "Be careful of the baby!"

So there were these dads... oooh, dads, sometimes they are so goddamn clueless they make me mad... anyway, there was a little posse of hipster dads, each with his own wee single child. I sat down with my Vanity Fair and sent my sons into the melee. "Make me proud, boys. Crack some toddler heads." No, I mean, of course not. I lectured them sternly about watching out for the smaller kids and being patient about taking turns.

THEN I catch Jason and Jeremy Alternadad querying each other about age limits in TinyTown. Loudly. In my direction. Big Man, you may know, is five. And well below the height limit for TinyTown, which, if they were regulars (i.e. moms), and not merely filling in during Spring Break and feeling all self-righteous about doing it, they'd know was on the wall next to the signpost in the area where you're supposed to leave your strollers.

Whiny overprotective posers. You wanna crank with the mommies, you need a little more practice. And by the way I'd like you guys to explain to my kids why we had to leave TinyTown earlier than they'd have liked, because me saying, "Sorry, guys, but those daddies over there were being passive-aggressive dickbags and I couldn't read my Vanity Fair in peace," is probably not ok.