Kids Are Awesome

As we were walking out of the food court from our fabulous trip to the mall last week, there was a busload of kids tromping through the place, headed for the restrooms. 50 or so adolescents waited in a raucous line for their turns in the lav. (This is totally a blind estimate; I'm so bad at estimating that it may as well have been 300 kids for all I know. So to sum up, there were pre-teens...they were rowdy...there were more than 10 of them...they stunned me into a lack of estimating ability. Carry on.)

Mia chose this moment to let me in on a secret. Well, me and the thousands of school kids around us. (Bad estimates are giving way to blatant exaggeration. Proceed.)

"Mama, I need to go pee-pee!" she yelled to me over all the hubbub.

Staring at the mulling crowd of kids, I could see no possibility of waiting in the back of that line for a few minutes of toilet time.

"We need to wait until we get home sweetie, do you think you can hold it for that long?"

In following with the amazingly good behavior she'd been using that day, she told me very nicely that, yes, she could hold it. I looked down to smile at her polite tone of voice (I try to encourage this tone since it's sometimes hard to come by...), and that's when I noticed how literally she'd taken my words.

She was, in fact, holding herself. Carefully covering her privates with her free hand, she looked up at me proudly. I tried to convince her that she didn't need to actually hold on, but she insisted that she'd do exactly what I'd asked of her. Plus, I couldn't get my point across right, what with all the adolescents listening in. I didn't want to start speaking biologically correct in those surroundings, so I sounded something like this..."No, I don't mean you have to hold yourself, just hold in your pee-pee. Wait, don't hold your pee-pee, just HOLD it. Like, wait to let it out. Oh, for the love of pity, just...never mind. You can hold it. Let's go FASTER. NO! Don't GO, just WALK, I mean."

And so we walked, in the midst of approximately ONE MEELLION pre-teen youth. (This is really getting out of hand. But my estimator is jammed with silly baby stories, and I can't stop it's unbelievable output.) Three girls: one kicked back in a stroller, one holding her pee-pee parts, and one pink cheeked mama, all dodging an entire universe of students blocking our path.