My husband and I are musicians. And we’re parents. When we are onstage, we do our best to really be ON stage. But all our “backstage” experiences with our son (our little frog) deeply affect who we are as people, thus musicians. Recent insights:
It is Spring in Boston! Not completely warm (yet), but we’ve had some really nice outdoor time, including an afternoon at the Mt. Auburn cemetery. Young Nigel and I met our pal Laura for a romp around the grounds, a great place for kids to run, enjoy trees and flowers and walk among history.
We had eaten recently. So we decided to leave our bags in the car and set off unencumbered by stuff. Should we get thirsty or hungry, we could just make our way back to the car. Simple!
Imagine my minimalist mommy moment of regret when Nigel, a good distance from the car, told me he needed to poop. I panicked for 2 seconds and then smiled,
“Here’s a fun, private tree for us! Let’s go into this little natural tent and do our business.”
No arguments from the kid! He squatted, as if this were our normal m.o. He even helped dig a big hole to bury his poop.
And since it was a pine tree (no leaves!), I used his undies to clean up. And I folded them neatly and put them in my back pocket. We enjoyed the rest of our walk with him clean.. and commando.
I felt like such a success, “high-fiveing a million angels,” as Liz Lemon would say. And while I have been carrying just a bit more along with us on our jaunts since then, I feel more confident about hard-core improvising than I did before the poo walk!
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(On a more somber note–but also in the spirit of simple and straightforward: graveyards have been great place to talk to my son about mortality and death. “This is where we bury people who don’t need their bones anymore… we used to have a lot more space, so we’d bury people. Now we don’t always do that, sometimes we turn their bones into ashes.”)
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