chicken mayhem

i really like chick-fil-a. it has relatively healthy food my kids love to eat, and a big *indoor* playground cleaned every day with bleach. it doesn't get much better than that.
except that something strange has happened to my nearest chicken heaven.
summer.
summer apparently means that even at 1:15 on a friday, when i happened to need a little sustenance and stoppage time (while jon ran to renew his license), it was jam-packed full of primarily elementary-school aged children and their moms.
one mom was hunched over a lap top while her three girls ate, then ran off unsupervised to play. another table was filled with six (count them, six) boys of all ages and sizes, unsupervised by a nanny figure (i'm assuming she was a nanny, since she was a different ethnicity and had no resemblance whatsoever to any of the boys, and appeared to be college-aged - at least, she was studying a textbook intently). they took over the playscape, hanging monkey-like from the padded support beams nine feet over head and screaming at the top of their lungs.
and without another option, or a car (jon dropped me off), i trepidatiously took my tiny children into the fray.
i lasted about 30 seconds before my hands started shaking and my teacher voice came out. honestly, i have no control over it sometimes. it comes from too many years in the classroom with too many disobedient children.
but it does tend to get results.
the boys clustered in a corner and whispered while pointing at me after i asked them to stop swinging wildly from the ceiling (one of them had narrowly missed sunny's head with his shoe). i couldn't care less. i was seething at the fact that there were a good ten or fifteen children in the small enclosed space, and two parents supervising.
two.
one of them was me.
and i wasn't supervising my children so much as fiercely protecting them from the havoc around them.
what is WRONG with you people? who do you think is watching these children? (besides me, apparently). and why on earth don't you WANT to know what's going on with your babies? what if someone's hurting them? what if they hurt someone else??
maybe i hover too much. and maybe in five years I'LL be the one hunched over the laptop, sending my kids to play.
i hope not. they may kick someone else in the head.
then where would we be. ;)