butt-crack bandit

we currently only have one car, so sometimes brooke & i don't get out very much anymore. it's been several days since brooke left the house, and earlier this week she made it to her "yay, you did it!" on her behavior chart, so i owed her something fun. i told her she could pick anything reasonable to do today & she wanted to go to chuck e cheese. yuck! i really don't like that place, but it does make me slightly happier to call it chuckie jesus like she used to back when she was 2 & thought that was the name. i've tried to make arrangements w/ a few friends to get together this weekend, but it hasn't worked out so far & we needed some out-of-the-house interaction & i guess the cheesey jesus is as good a place as any to get it, especially when it's cold & windy outside.

so brooke was meandering about, spending her tokens willy-nilly & i let her be free for a while before i wandered off to locate her. i found her at the ski ball games playing with another little girl who's probably 2-3 years younger than her. they were happily collecting tickets & throwing their balls spastically about into several different game chutes. every time brooke bent down to retrieve her wayward ball, there was a wee bit of butt cleavage showing. she got some new jeans that clearly don't fit her well, but she loves them because they've got icarly on the label & since they were on clearance, i bought them. what was i thinking? neither she nor i are built for the skinny fit, but i guess i had hoped i could still work it out on her. no such luck.

i reminded her to pull the jeans up, but whatever, every time she bent down, the crack was back. i gave up & tried not to look. instead i looked around at any of the adults in the area to make sure none of them was paying undo attention. thankfully, they weren't. i'd have hated to have to release my inner new york bitch in the middle of the cheese!

brooke brought her friend to the table to meet me & then her friend invited brooke to come meet her mom & said "you'll like her, she's nice!" and off they ran. brooke returned alone a moment later & her friend came back a minute after that & said, "my mom said i can't play with you anymore. she said since i brought a friend with me, i have to play with her instead of you. i still like you though & don't want to hurt your feelings." poor brooke sat there trying so hard to be tough & hold the tears back, but they were dangerously close to spilling over as she looked down w/ a supremely sad face. "i thought you said your mom was nice" she mumbled.

i have to say that i understand where the other mom was coming from, but i felt sad for my girl who was so happy to have found a friend only to have her whisked away so quickly! it wasn't long before she decided to go climb the tower tubes & i saw her sitting in the big overhanging corner box thing up at the top of the tube system & she was crouched down, glaring at the girl & her not-nice mom. she was bent down in such a way that half her butt was showing from the back of her pants & she was in that box thing that looked kinda like a bird cage & all i could think of was that she's a new species of bird, the butt-crack bird! and apparently they're a predatory bird because she looked like she wanted to tear up & possibly eat the prey below her.

brooke came back to my table after a while & told me that since she was out of tokens, she was going to walk around & look to see if anyone spilled their cup so she could pick up their scraps. i told her that would be equivalent to stealing if she saw it happen & then took one rather than giving it back, but there was a look in her eye that made me think she was of a different opinion. like, what mom doesn't know won't hurt me! i could just imagine, as she left me, that she was stealthily walking about, peering around the corners of games in hopes of finding some clumsy toddler who might "accidentally" trip or get distracted so that she could lighten their token load & have herself another ride on the roller coaster simulator! now i've got a butt-crack bandit on the loose!

all in all, the trip to the cheese ended well, in spite of our bumps & security wasn't called, so i guess that means the bandit didn't strike any unsuspecting prey or else she was so smooth that i need to watch closely next time. maybe count to check that the tokens don't magically multiply when i'm not looking.