Night of the living dead?

Yesterday, the kids and I met Becca and Fenley at the Edmondson Pike Library to play on their playground. It was a REALLY HOT day, so we tried to stay in the shade as much as possible. There was a large tree nearby shading a picnic table, so we grabbed a seat.

We let the girls run around (sweating their little tails off) while we caught up with each other. One of Becca's friends was there with her two girls and we offered to keep an eye on her infant in her carseat carrier while she ran inside to let the older one go to the potty. A small girl approached, obviously very interested in the baby, and climbed onto the table to look at her. Her mom was fairly close on a cell phone call. The girl sneezed on the baby's foot and the mom ran over (still on the phone) to tell her to get down. She moved the child to the playgound mulch and dashed off so the person she was talking to on the phone wouldn't hear her daughter cry. The little girl went straight back to the picnic table to check out the baby. Mom again grabbed her by the hand and dragged her over a concrete curb and into the mulch and dashed away so her conversation wouldn't be interrupted, leaving the girl lying on her back throwing a fit. I wanted to grab the mom's phone and toss it. Bizarre.

We stayed in our spots under the tree for quite a while, periodically jumping up to make sure the girls didn't venture too close to dangerous playground dropoffs. Finally at one point, Becca looked down at her feet and said, "I KNEW I was feeling something under my feet." I thought she had been referring to an anthill or some sort of bug. But I looked down and didn't see anything. I thought Becca was nuts. Then I realized that she meant not just under her feet, but under the ground, too. The ground was moving. Something was under us crawling around.

We got a stick and started digging in the dirt. Our behavior seemed a little odd to our girls, so Avery and Fenley came over to investigate. When we started digging, the bumping moved a few feet over. We backed away and watched as it moved back to the spot where we'd been digging. Would it come up through the hole? We were freaking out! Periodically poking at the hole, we couldn't take our eyes off the spot where we expected to see a paw or claw or snout (or zombie!). Nothing. The little booger (whatever it was) wouldn't break through the surface. We must have scared it off. Deserves it. It scared the daylights out of us.