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No TV, no lights, no Internet - but plenty of bored kids

By SUE CARLTON
Published November 4, 2005

In the middle of a Target store in suburban Broward County, little kids are hurtling across the floor like hockey players, literally bouncing off walls.

They aren't in an official play area, just running between baby clothes and housewares, but no one seems to care. It's week two of post-hurricane siege, and everyone's a little stir crazy.

"They're basically bored," says Jean Holbrook, with her three dark-haired daughters, 4, 8, and 10, in tow. Emily, the youngest, takes off across the store at full sprint.

"I'm going crazy," her mother says.

Parents had been hoping public schools here would reopen this week, as they did in Miami-Dade County - "If there is a God," as a woman in the Target parking lot says. But given the damage and the number of traffic signals still out, officials decided it won't happen until next week.

That left already stressed-out parents struggling to come up with more strategies for all the unexpected time off after Hurricane Wilma. For some, it has meant figuring out how to go back to work themselves with kids still at home, sending them scrambling for community center day programs or willing relatives.

Everyone else, it seemed, has come to the mall.

Platoons of school-age kids and parents pack food courts. Movie theaters look like Disney World on spring break.

"It's getting old," Judith Baker says as she loads her 8-year-old son into the family Jeep. "I'm ready for them to go back to school." Next, they're headed to Toys 'R Us and then to see a movie involving something called a were-rabbit. Her son tags along when she works out at the park; he's played with toys he'd all but forgotten.

"I'm making him read a lot," she says. "He's ready to go back to school."

And remember, this is no ordinary time off. Homes that still don't have power don't have TV, Internet, even hot meals. A woman sipping coffee at the food court tells me she and her husband finally shooed their son and his friend outside with their skateboards. The boys soon came back to glumly inform them that there was not enough open concrete to ride in a world of felled trees and branches.

For the Holbrooks, who still don't have power, it's meant eating out, including one embarrassing incident in which they finally reached the front of the line at McDonald's only to learn that, in a post-hurricane world, the restaurant couldn't take mom's debit card. "It's just very frustrating," Mrs. Holbrook says. "I'm washing clothes in the bathtub. It's like I'm in another country."

Her husband bought a gadget that runs a small TV off the car battery - someone give that man a cold beer - so the girls did get a Disney fix.

People will tell you it's not all bad, that life slowed down a little. Kids are reading, discovering an old dollhouse or the skates that had been bound for the next garage sale. A woman told me she finally got around to teaching her daughter to play jacks, and wondered how could she have overlooked something as basic as jacks?

Around suburbia, families have been holding stress-reducing slumber parties, as in, you take the kids one night, we get them the next. Heavy-duty extension cords stretch from homes with power to neighbors without. At my sister's house, where they were lucky enough to get power back in a couple of days, the washing machine has churned nonstop with other people's laundry. A mother borrowed the kitchen to bake a cake for her son's birthday.

All well and good, but it's week two now. A sign at a Pembroke Pines McDonald's says they're out of Happy Meals. At a nearby dollar store, shelves have been emptied of every coloring book.

Back at Target, Mrs. Holbrook's oldest daughter Sandra tells me she's looking forward to going back to school, to friends and hot lunches, not so much the homework. As we talk, little Emily is on her belly on the floor. She appears to be doing The Worm.

"Mommy's getting more cranky," says Sandra. Her mother smiles at her. No argument there.

Sue Carlton can be reached at carlton@sptimes.com

[Last modified November 4, 2005, 01:40:17]