Don’t Leave The Path.

Can I just tell you a little story about poop?

(I mean, it’s not as if I have never done that before – right?)

Last Friday our home school Suburban headed to Pisgah Forest in North Carolina for a Stream Investigations Class.

The class was great.

The water was cold.

I dressed the kids in matching tie-dyed Look Up Lodge shirts so that I could easily spot their wayward selves among the thirty other children.

I am not normally a children-match-one-another kind of mom.

But it worked out pretty perfectly, actually.

Otto Fox stayed strapped to my back in his carrier most of the day.

Sometimes he was happy about that.

Mostly, he was not.

Mid-way through investigating the cold cold stream waters,

a soaking wet tie-dyed clad boy of six approached me

with a look of desperation in his eyes

and a hand clamped to his soggy rear end.

“Moooooom, I’ve got to go,” he stage whispered.  “Bad.”

“Just pee, right?” I asked, hoping that maybe I could send some strong message to his brain that would enable his body to need to urinate instead of to defecate simply by the power of my suggestion.

That didn’t work.

We were in a hard place suddenly.

The public restrooms were a half mile or more away.

Fox was on my back.

Piper Finn was clinging to my leg.

And Mosely and London were knee deep in the stream and I was supposed to be their “parent-in-charge”.

Uh-oh.

I scrambled Bergen and Piper (who refused to wait without me) with Otto on my back to some nearby trees.

I got us off the trail and out of view.

I dug a hole.

And I told Berg he had to just do what needed to be done in that hole.

And fast.

(He is notorious around our house for his lengthy bathroom stays.)

Yes, we used leaves to take care of the business at hand.

And then I tried to bury the mess.

With sticks and dirt and lots more leaves.

So,

listen,

if you find yourself hiking at Pisgah any time soon,

one word of advice –

whatever you do . . .

Stay on the trail!