My Date With Joey

Monday I had a date with my friend's 3 year old son, Joey. Nick and Katie had moved that weekend and really needed the day to unpack. So Joey was all mine! With Auntie Laura in charge, I will inevitably break some child rearing rules. This also means that my goal of teaching him annoying phrases continues on. This day I focused on "Radical", "Totally Awesome", and "Rock and Roll!". I know these phrases aren't that bad, but they're born-again, so I gotta keep it clean.

We started the day by going to this weird indoor jungle gym place with tubes and nets to climb around. We had celebrated Joey's birthday there the week before. It was fun and I had already successfully humiliated myself there, so why not go back? Also, apparently exposing yourself to a group of people is ok there, because they let me right back in.

Let me explain...I am skirt wearing girl. I'm just more comfortable in skirts. However, I did know there would be playing and keeping this in mind, I decided to wear a longer denim pencil skirt. Which was totally fine, until after lunch. You see the kids eat lunch upstairs. Then afterward, they open this little door and shove the kids through the door "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" style. The kids disappear down this slide and everyone's happy. Well, Joey isn't crazy about slides. So all the other kids go shooting off to other places. Only Joey and a few adults left at the top. So he decided he will go down the slide with Auntie Laura. We climb in and just as we are about to go, he changes his mind again. He decides that the cute little high school worker guy should ride on my lap instead. To which I respond "I don't know if uncle Mario would like that"(when I told Mario about this later, he said "I think Uncle Mario would pay to see that guy ride down the slide on your lap"...thanks a lot).



I figure, I'm already in the slide, why waste a perfectly good ride? So I wave good bye to the other adults(who I might add are totally not worried about where their children have disappeared to) and start the decent. Now I was warned about these slides, they are long and you catch some speed. So I was totally prepared for the that. I less prepared for my fitted skirt to be up around my waist when I arrive at the bottom of the slide. Of course now that my ass is exposed to the plastic, I came to a screeching hault three feet from the end of the slide. It was an enclosed slide, so I couldn't just hope up and run away. No, I have to hop scoot my ass to the end slide, making that bare skin squeak as I go. As I'm quickly trying to get to safety, I hear Joey at the top of the slide yell "GOOD JOB AUNTIE LAURA!". Yeah great job.

When I finally clear the slide and stand up, it's then that I realize my friend's husband and a group of children were witness to the entire show. The look on his face said it all. Horror! I pulled down my skirt and ran mumbling past them trying to play it cool. Of course the next person I ran into was his wife. I promptly apologized for any night terrors Mark might have that night, and explained to her what happened. She thought it was hysterical but every time Mark would pass me he'd just shake his head.

So after all of that, you'd think that I would have learned my lesson and wear pants on Monday. Nope. I wore a skirt again because I was running late and couldn't find any pants. I would have looked harder had I known that Joey can climb up to the third level of the jungle gym...but he can't climb down. I climbed up to the third level I-don't-know-how-many-times! There comes a point when you don't care who sees what and just climb!(this is where I recommend chasing a kid around one of these places for two hours...I was so sore the next day from all the damn climbing!)


The rest of the day was pretty quiet because me and the kid were both exhausted from the jungle gym. And yes I did get in trouble for letting him have a sip of my diet coke. At which point I ratted out Nick, because I have seen him give Joey orange soda...at least mine was diet! Ok I also got in trouble for letting him fall asleep in the car instead of getting him into a bed faster...because as soon as I got him back to Nick and Katie, he was having some major melt-downs. Oh well, I know there'll be payback when I'm a mother.