Before he knew it, and without giving it serious consideration, George was driving towards the mall. He remembered a children’s play area there that was always populated with buzzing kids, but the more he thought about his natural inclination to head to the mall the more he began to feel like a mindless zombie from a George Romero movie. Being a weekday morning the mall was not busy, the only visitors being senior citizens walking for exercise, who would disperse when the mall stores officially opened in an hour. George strollered his daughters through the geriatric herd until he found the play area. He was unsure what to expect from the play area, his only expectations for it coming from seeing so many kids there whenever they were at the mall, but what he saw caught him completely off guard; it was breakfast-themed: bacon slides, waffle climbing walls, muffin seats, a berry ball-pit. Dinosaurs, Saturday morning cartoon characters, generic shapes, all these options made more sense than breakfast. As George was unstrapping Sophia from the stacked double stroller, and removing her shoes, he couldn't help but think of the engineer who gets tasked with designing a children’s play area and thinks, breakfast! How many stamps of approval do you have to receive to ok a children's play area? How many people saw Donut Themed Play Area, and thought, I'm ok with this. Was he nervous right before unveiling sausage link crawl tubes to investors?
George held the entrance gate open as Sophia quickly wobbled in; the spongy safety floor made it difficult to push the stroller, so George found the nearest muffin he could, and sat down. He looked down at his feet, which he was using to test the floor's give. The floor was as equally breakfast themed as the rest of the area, with graphics of pancakes, blueberries, bagels, sticks of butter, and other various breakfast essentials patterned across its surface. George looked over at Charlotte, who was in the bottom part of the stacked stroller; she was looking back at him, and behind the pacifier in her mouth, she smiled.
Sophia was enthralled with the breakfast play area, and was currently laying on top of one of the many over-easy eggs, with her legs sticking straight up in the air, swinging them back and forth. George turned his gaze to the mall-walkers; envisioning himself among the crowd in thirty years; trying to make the connection between the toddler lost in amazement on top of a giant plastic semi-cooked egg, the adult judging everything around him including said egg, and the seniors who didn't give a shit about anything; the transition from each as equally impossible as inevitable. Just then Sophia let out a shriek that would have been more appropriate coming from a choked balloon, and when George looked up she was running towards the berry ball-pit, the shriek becoming more staccato with each step. He stood up and guided the stroller across the play area to the ball-pit where Sophia was now standing tentatively, staring at the massive collection of fake fruits. George set the brake on the stroller, and in one swift motion scooped Sophia up in both arms and dove backwards into the ball-pit, sending hundreds of plastic berries flying in every direction; father and daughter screaming in excitement.
From inside the ball-pit George noticed a disruption in the elderly flow, a lone senior walking in the opposite direction as his peers. George followed the anomaly through the crowd and began to pick up random features: tall, overweight, brilliant white hair, giant clomping black boots, and flashes of red. George could tell by the rickety gait that the man wasn't there for exercise, and he was almost convinced his eighteen month old toddler had a better grasp on the concept of walking than him. George returned his attention to the play area to check on Sophia who had crawled out of the ball-pit, and was now trying to climb a stack of pancakes. By the time George had escaped the pit, Sophia had settled for sitting on a pad of butter; realizing she had finally spent her reserve of seemingly endless energy, George decided it was time to move on.