Don't let em catch you smokin'

"I'm a good mommy"

So we're at the Rays game. Lou, the usher told my party that we could sneak down a little bit lower if we like, so we did. Lou's a good guy, if not a little slow to the point.

He mentioned that we could have brought our own food in and without pausing began to recommend several local restaurants that have great food to go before I stopped him, saying "Wait... we can bring in our own food?".

He said "yeah", I said "wow!", and that I would smoke something next time!

"Don't let em catch you smokin', they don't let people smoke in here" he replied.

No Lou, not that kind of smoke. Smoked meat my friend... Lou wouldn't stop talking long enough for me to inform him that I did not mean actually smoking something in The Trop.

A lady sat two rows below us with her two sons and daughter. All were fully garbed in jerseys of various players and team baseball caps.
Once seated she fished out from her purse two iPads and an iPhone, distributing them to the already distracted and arguing children.


This calmed them for a couple of minutes until one of them realized that they had been give THE WRONG IPAD and couldn't play their choice of game since only the other iPad had that game. There was shouting between the older boy and his young sister.

After the commotion had escalated to a noticeably embarrassing level, the "mother" looked up from Facebook, glanced at my row and noticed that I had noticed and was now mentally cataloging her children's interactions. She quickly broke out of indifferent egg producer mode and took care of the situation by smacking her older son on the face and telling her daughter to shut up, because people are watching and it was embarrassing. She then continued her constructive parenting technique by turning around to smile as if her smile was the Neuralyzer from Men In Black, and then it was back to Facebook.

She obviously thought this was good enough and that surely my curiosities were satisfied, but she doesn't know me. I continued to watch... for the next 4 hours.

The children continued to scuffle over the idevices while the mother continued to FB away the day, only looking up from the phone long enough to snap a picture of the most entertaining baseball game I've ever personally attended so she could post it. I don't make a habit of reading stranger's phone screens, and she was too far away anyway, but I'm sure the picture was captioned with something like "Having a blast with my favorite people at the Rays game!".

Aren't they all?

The middle son, age 5 or so sucked his thumb the entire time as did the 3 or 4 year old daughter, confirming so many of my overly judgmental assumptions about her parenting.

The older son's iPad eventually died and he snapped back to reality in time to realize that he was in fact seated in an arena with cheering, shouting, engaged humans.

Good for you, kid.