Page 73 of Own the Eights Maybe Baby
11
Jordan
“Toddlers,” Jordan whispered on a shaky exhale.
Memories of the baby doc’s waiting room flashed through his mind. He raised his hand and pressed his fingers to his cheek, remembering the toddler’s cherub-like face right before the little devil clocked him below the eye.
“We need to hide all the board books,” he said, trailing behind Georgie and Talya as they passed row after row of books, then descended upon the children’s area, and he froze.
A handful of years ago, when Maureen’s twins were around five or six years old, she’d asked if he could help her out and pick the girls up from a birthday party. The request seemed simple enough, and he was always happy to help. So, of course, he’d said yes.
What Maureen hadn’t mentioned when she’d given him the address of the party was that it was being held at a children’s pizza and arcade venue.
Noise didn’t usually bother him. The gym he’d worked at during that time always had loud music playing, and he’d often have his headphones on, blaring his own tunes. But not even that had prepared him for sound and the fury he’d encountered when he entered the pepperoni scented pandemonium.
Strobe lights flashed wild shades of color while children’s music and the maddening hum of video games pulsed as if he’d entered an underground rave. It damn near made him want to scream and run out the door. It was purely dumb luck that the twins had been banging away on a Whack-a-Mole near the entrance when he’d arrived. He was there only for a minute, possibly two, before he’d extricated the children and freed himself from that house of horrors.
But even that nightmare hadn’t prepared him for the mayhem that played out before his eyes inside his wife’s bookshop.
Unlike the doctor’s waiting area, with a sprinkling of noisy and somewhat dangerous tiny humans, the story time area was chock-full of toddlers. He blinked again. Maybe there weren’t as many as he thought, but they zoomed around the story time area like bees, massing around a cluster of flowers in a frenzy of motion.
Talya’s gaze bounced between them and a gaggle of children climbing on top of Simon, presumably for horse rides—or perhaps that’s how the tiny beasts overpowered adults.
“They’re kind of riled up,” Talya said with a cringe.
“Kind of?” he repeated, then glanced at his wife, whose jaw had nearly hit the floor.
“Where are their parents?” Georgie asked, scanning the space.
“They said they got an email from some guys named Lenny and Stu, telling them that this was a parents’ afternoon off activity and that they could leave their toddlers here for a thirty-minute story time. You’d mentioned that babies were coming, but Simon and I figured you guys changed the plans,” Talya replied.
Georgie pushed up onto her tiptoes and stared past the rows of books. “Their parents are gone? They’re not even in the shop?”
Talya shook her head. “No, they said they wanted to do a little shopping on Tennyson Street. They seemed epically excited to leave their kids here,” the teen added with another cringe.
He was sure they were!
He looked around as a trio of pint-sized boys played tug of war with a bean bag chair while a little girl removed her shoes and proceeded to suck on her big toe.
This was not what Lenny and Stu had said would happen. From their last email, the plan was to have a few parents bring their babies in for a thirty-minute music and movement story time. He’d envisioned gentle cooing as four or five human versions of Faby sat on their parents’ laps, listening to Georgie read a book and then him, leading the group in some infant-appropriate exercise—not this melee of two-year-olds, ransacking the place like a bunch of bloodthirsty pint-sized Vikings.
His phone buzzed, and he pulled it out to find a text from Stu.
We mixed up your baby story time with a parents’ afternoon out event. We know this toddler activity isn’t the facilitated baby intervention we talked about, but Lenny and I agree, it’s still a good learning experience. Have fun!
“Who’s the text from?” Georgie asked.
“Stu.”
“And? Are they coming? Did you tell them what’s going on?” Georgie asked with a hopeful lilt.
He shook his head. “Stu said it’s a mix-up. They sent the wrong group here. But we still have to go with it.”
A crash caught their attention as a pair of little girls with pink bows in their hair pushed over a child-sized table.
“It’s getting rough in here,” she said, wide-eyed.
“We wish that we could stay and help, but Simon and I have to attend a lecture at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science for school. It starts in fifteen minutes,” Talya said apologetically as Simon army-crawled his way out from under the children.
