Wednesday, April 2, 2014

The Last Five Minutes Anywhere Fun

I swear, the last five minutes we are anywhere fun, my kids lose their minds.  It's not your typical "I don't want to go home" tantrums.  No, it's mania.  It's nonsense.  It's impossible, except that it totally happens. 

Take today.  We joined some of Kaia's classmates at the park after school.  There were 8 kids there or so.  Everyone played nicely.  Neither of my kids got hurt or cried.  It was awesome.  Slowly the moms and kids trickled back to their mini vans and headed home.  I told mine it was time to go.  Although they stalled and didn't want to leave, there were no tantrums.  No one cried, no one screamed, and no one tantrumed.

Mikko asked if he could climb over the rock that bordered the parking lot.  Sure, kid, knock yourself out.  Kaia was walking toward us on the perimeter of the same rocks.  Within thirty seconds, it was absolute chaos.  I spent the last five minutes at the park trying to recover.

Mikko decided to go around the rocks instead of over.  It would have been a reasonable, perhaps even wise, choice but for the six inch deep mud.  As his shoes sunk into the mud, he tried to take a step forward. Unfortunately, his feet weren't moving where his upper body led.  He went down, knees, chest and chin into the mud.  Although he didn't cry, he was caked in mud.  He literally had an inch of it on each hand, and it took me a while to pry his still stuck shoes from their place.  

Kaia walked up as I was taking Mikko's mud pants off for the ride home.  She sort of mumbled something about a fly.  I was a little distracted and it sounded a little silly.  She started to get panicky and I asked what she was trying to tell me.  A fly was on her.  Oy, child.  Do you see this mud soaked maniac squirming in my arms?  She was not overly concerned.  She was, however, extremely concerned about said fly.  I drop pantless Mikko into his car seat and turn to her.  I see no fly.

So, I try to explain to her that there's no fly and she keeps insisting there is.  She claims it flew into her jacket and she refused to move.  So I took off the jacket.  Sure enough a house fly flew out.  Problem solved, right?  Well, until the fly flew back and landed on her leg.  You'd think the thing had shot her.  She squealed like a teenage girl and started hysterical sobbing.  (Funny side note, I remember stories of another little girl who screamed bloody murder over a lady bug in the back seat of a car on a road trip.  Apple doesn't fall so far from the tree.)  She screamed and sobbed the entire way home. 

Somehow, always in the last five minutes, it becomes very clear that we've stayed ten minutes too long.  It doesn't matter how long we stay, there is always some madness in the last five minutes.  So we're huddled on the couch now where we are safe from flies and mostly clean from mud.  Safe and sound and dreading the last five minutes of the next time we do anything fun.