Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Chicken Nuggets? Yes. Pants? Not so much.

Now that I have your attention with that headline, let me tell you a story. It's a story about life with little boys. If you have kids, you've probably had at least once major incident where your kid, ehem, exposed him or herself publicly.

Seeing as we live in Europe, this is a normal part of life. People let their kids pee (and do other things) anywhere and no one thinks anything of it. A few years ago at the rest stop along the Alabama/Mississippi border, Thad decided to drop trou and pee all over the sidewalk. As horrifying as that was, Ian managed to top it this year.

I may be wrong for doing this, but I lay all of the blame at the feet of the Chick-fil-A organization. Perhaps if they had a sign like this up in all of their restaurants, none of what I'm about to tell you would ever have happened.

If you know my wife, you know that while she is in Austria she feens for Chick-fil-A like a heroine addict does for a fix. So naturally the first meal she wanted to eat on our journey from Atlanta to Jackson was Chick-fil-A. We go into the store and the boys immediately went into the indoor playroom and did their thing.

After ordering food, we all sat down to eat. When we finished eating, Ian, as is his habit, annonced that he had to go "poop." We've tried for months to get him to keep this info to himself and to just go and do his business. Clearly what we're doing isn't working. So, Ian left to do his thing and we continued eating.

That's when disaster struck. From behind I heard the words no parent wants to hear in a restaurant after your kid has left to go to the bathroom: "Daddy, can you put my pants and underwear on me." Now, Ian is four years old and knows how to put pants on. That said, sometimes he's lazy and brings his pants and underwear to us to put them on him. We've been refusing to help him and so he eventually puts them on himself.

I immediately jumped up, all the while noticing the horrified and amused looks on the faces of my fellow patrons as Ian stood there in all his little boy glory. I grabbed the dude and took him back into the bathroom. When we came out, multiple individuals where smiling and laughing. We were able to continue eating our meal and we certainly got a great story out of the experience.

I'm both excited and slightly terrified about what else awaits me as a parent this summer, given how things have started off.

1 comment:

Brittany said...

More stories for the blog! He's going to love that you put that online when he's 15! lol
(also, good word: feen)