Recall my
post from November 27th of last year. Fast forward to today, and it seems poop really is still comical.
Today we took Meema's niece Tess down the road a way to rendez vous with her mom. The "with Tess" part of our trip is over, and she's headed off to summer camp tomorrow. The drive to Whitney Point was about an hour and fifteen minutes long, but it would have been more like an hour if we hadn't had to stop to let the girls pee when we got into Ithaca. We stopped at a gas station that didn't have a restroom, so they had to hike half a block to a hotel to do their business. Fifteen minutes later we were back on the road, with about 25 minutes to our destination. Twenty minutes in, Lily informed us that she had to go potty yet again. Running late as it was, we told her she had to hold it until we got to the McDonalds where we were meeting Tess' mom, and remarkably she was able to. Crisis, temporarily, averted.
After the drop-off it was back into Ithaca for dinner at The Boat Yard, which is another story altogether. What's relevant, however, is that Lily peed when we got there, and again when we left an hour later. From there we went across the street to play at a park for a half hour or so, then headed to Wegmans for some groceries to get us through the rest of our stay. When we got inside, Lil had to go potty again, so I took her straight in. She peed, again, and we went on about our shopping. To recap, that's 5 urinations in the span of 3.5 hours, and she'd had only a single Capri Sun and a few sips of lemonade to drink. That being said, you'll understand that I didn't push the issue of making her try to potty before we left the store, as it's only a 25 minute drive back up to the cottage.
Talk about your all-time backfires. About a third of the way up the lake road Lily proclaims "Meema, I've gotta go pee-pee!" in her most urgent voice. We were torn . . should we make an emergency stop for her, or push our luck a little bit and try to make it back to the house? Well, she went ahead and made that decision for us, having an accident a mere two minutes later. Meema insisted we pull over and let her try to finish, so I pulled quickly into the driveway of one of the McMansions along the road. Meema hurried around to Lily's door, got her unbuckled from her seat, and ran her out behind a brick wall to let her go potty. Somehow, she also had the wherewithal to grab a paper towel from under the seat of the car, and it would pay off in spades.
They managed to get Lil's panties off with lightning quickness, and before you knew it she was popping a squat in some stranger's yard. After a few seconds with no visible results, Lily's posture changed noticeably, in a way that was all too familiar to me. Her thighs flexed, her neck extended, and just like that she was squeezing out a little turd. Appalled, I took off my hat and buried my face in the steering wheel, just hoping no one inside the house could get a good description of the guy driving the car with the kid that crapped in the lawn. Meema looked over to me and mouthed the words "she pooped", as if somehow I could have missed that fact. I hollered frantically at her "I know that, just get her in the car quick before somebody calls the cops!"
When they got back to the car, I was prodding them to hurry the heck up so we could get out of there. Inexplicably, Meema asked me to open the trunk.
"Why the heck do you need to get in the trunk?" I yelled.
"I'm gonna put the poop back there," she said.
You can only imagine the look on my face. "I wasn't going to just leave it in their yard," she finished.
"Well hell," I said, "I woulda just thrown it in the woods or something!"
She insisted on bringing the poop home though, so she finished strapping Lily in, put the turd in an empty bag (on the opposite side of the trunk from the groceries, thank goodness), and got back in to the car. I high-tailed it out of the driveway and hustled up the road. As we left the house, I noticed a "For Sale" sign on the other side of the wall Lily pooped behind . . I can only hope that means that nobody was home. As we drove up the road and laughed about our evening, Meema shared one last little tidbit that just put the icing on the cake. She said that as she realized there was no more pee-pee coming out, Lily looked at her and said "Uh-oh, I got a poopie!" A classic Lily moment to be sure, and she was narrating it as usual.
