Where the White Things Are: A Sandwich at Sunnyview

This morning I decided to run on the bike path while Amber rode her bike. We parked at Walmart, unloaded Amber's bike in the chilly sunshine, crossed the railroad tracks, and got on the bike path. Amber is a SLOW biker. I ran up ahead, then back to her, over and over and over, back and forth, back and forth, for what amounted to about a mile of the bike path. My watch told me I had run two miles over that one mile distance. At last we came to Sunnyview Park. I decided I was done with the bike path back-and-forth but still wanted to run more. So we dashed across the busy road to the park, where Amber parked her bike and played while I ran laps around her.

After about five minutes of jogging around the park, I realized that I couldn't see Amber anywhere. We had the park to ourselves, so it should not have been difficult to spot her pink boots and wild hair roaming around. But she was nowhere to be found! I ran over towards the silent playground, wildly wondering how on earth the girl could have given me the slip between the 30 second increments that I glanced over at the playground while running laps around it. Finally, far out in the middle of the massive field beyond the playground, I saw Amber wandering and slowly turning on the spot, clearly looking for me. I ran over to her.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"The bathroom is LOCKED!" she replied, with anxious eyes. Oh boy. Every parent in history is familiar those particular anxious eyes.

"Do you have to pee or poop?"

"Pee?" she said in a tiny voice, with a question at the end. Sigh. She had gone to the bathroom before we left home!

"At least she doesn't have to go #2," I told myself as I herded Amber over to a tree. The thin bare tree trunk wasn't much privacy, but it was better than Amber dropping her drawers in the middle of the wide open field in full view of the busy nearby highway.

Amber walked to the tree s-l-o-w-l-y. I took the opportunity to flex my patience muscles. They were already rather fatigued from our bike path back-and-forth, so it was a challenge. The Amb-girl is a speed demon when it comes to evasive maneuvers, but ask her to do something specific and she is a total turtle! At last Amber arrived at my chosen tree. I had her pull down her pants, then held her legs while she squatted to do her business. No pee came.

"Are you going to pee?" I asked, arms shaking slightly from supporting all of Amber's high-percentile weight. Amber responded in another tiny voice.

"It's poop."

"What!!?? Ahhhh! No!!!" One downward glance told me that it was too late to do... whatever I would have done to prepare for this. So I held Amber's thighs and waited, resisting the impulse to ask if she was done every second. (I asked every other second.) At last she declared herself finished. Thankfully/somehow she didn't care that we had no toilet paper. After I set Amber upright, she pulled up her pants while I uncomfortably brainstormed what to do with the excrement.

As I cast my eyes around the barren park landscape with increasing horror at the possibilities in my near future, a rare fully intact dry leaf caught my attention. Usually leaves fall in autumn and then blow away and on all of the intense winds that accost our valley during seasonal changes. Any remaining leaves are usually ground up by lawn mowers. So in spite of the dozen or so trees in the park, leaves were not in abundance. The leaf I found was about the size of my palm. I picked it up, hoping it wouldn't fall apart at my touch. Success! The leaf was a survivor. And hopefully a shovel too.

Holding a stick in one hand and the leaf in the other, I scooped and scooted Amber's "log" onto the leaf, using the stick to spear and scoot a few other little unattached bits and add them to the leaf. Success! I had the poop on the leaf! But, eeeew, I was holding poop on a leaf! In my hand! I looked around. The nearest trash can was about fifty feet away near a picnic table. I walked towards it, scouring the ground for any possible assistance. I picked up another leaf and sort of sandwiched it on top of my fragrant handful. Yum. A leaf-poop sandwich.

I should add that I was wearing my running gloves during this operation. Not exactly impervious, but the barrier did help my sensibilities slightly.

Trying not to gag too much, I tossed the smelly sandwich into the trash can. There was no bag in the bin, and the soft innards of the sandwich kind of splatted when it hit the bottom. Amber went off to play and I continued running, cringing at what I had just done. After another few laps, I couldn't take it anymore. When the park officially opened for summer, someone would put a trash bag into that bin and the leaf-crusted poop-wich would still be down there, underneath the trash bag. I'm sure this is not the grossest thing that the park had ever witnessed by any means, but I am all about doing my part for nature and the community. Leaving poop splatted inside a bare trashcan rubbed my sense of civic duty completely the wrong way. Curse my responsible-ness!

While jogging and cringing, I began strategizing ways to clean up our mess. I'd probably have to come back later with a plastic bag and scoop the poop into it to dispose of it properly, like doggy poop cleanup duty. That would be a pain. Then, up ahead, like a mirage, I saw a plastic grocery bag that had blown up against a chain link fence. The logo clearly identified its origin as the popular local grocery store, Fiesta Foods. Bless my lucky stars, Fiesta Foods, and strong winds! I ran over, snagged the bag, and went back to the trashcan of doom. Scooping the nasty leaf poop sandwich into the plastic bag was simple, once I held my breath and ignored all of the other nasty scum stuck to the inside of the trashcan's belly.

Success! I dropped the poopy Fiesta bag into the bin and felt much relieved. (Hmm, it may be too soon for that type of pun...)

With her load significantly lightened, Amber received a second wind and happily played on the playground, in the field, and on the skate park ramps for longer than I expected to run. It was barely 40 degrees so I had to keep running or else I'd freeze sitting around the park in my shorts! When my watch beeped 6 miles, I convinced Amber that it was time to go. We retrieved her bike, jetted across the busy street back to the bike path, and resumed our slow-pedaling back-and-forth running all the way back to Walmart. With plenty of stop-and-sit breaks for Amber and maternal push-boost assistance to her back. By the time I stopped my watch to walk in the last 200 meters, I had run 8.5 miles. Amber biked about 3 miles round trip.

During one of Amber's long rest breaks, I tried motivating her to hurry up and ride back to the car with the lure of getting a "special drink" at Walmart afterwards. It helped a little, but she still stopped and rested a few more times and walked her bike another time before we made it back. Success is success, though, so we still went into Walmart and picked out a special drink--one of those small bottles that has a big Disney character head on top, with a hole in it that the kid drinks out of. Because drinking the brains out of a favorite character's head is special and fun? As we walked out of Walmart, Amber happily sucked red [fruit] juice from the head of Elena of Avalor. Kids can be joyfully gruesome.

When we got home, I immediately put my gloves in the wash.

The beginning is always the happiest part.

Sunny sign overload! Sunnyside Sunnyview Park--whew, we love our sun around here.

The grass was extra bumpy-lumpy so I ran my loops on these convenient skinny sidewalks that crisscrossed the space.

Forget that traditional playground, Amber played twice as long on the ramps and rails of the skate park! She removed her boots and socks for extra traction and ran up and down the ramps, slipping and sliding all over the place.