Poopfest 2008

We went on our annual field trip to Farm Field Day on Tuesday. We had the afternoon session, which goes from 11:40 to about 1:30, so we had to eat lunch before the field trip otherwise everyone would be starving afterwards. Of course, nobody was hungry! It was only 10:30 for crying out loud. Still, better early than cranky seven-year-olds on the bus-ride back to school. We eat lunch at Discovery Park, which is about the coolest park around. Everything was going fine until the unexpected happened. Leslie and Kerri saw our friend, we will call him John, poke his head out of the bathroom and talk to the park maintenance workers. When they started looking around for the person in charge they knew something was up. When she walked over there she saw that he was covered in diarrhea from the waist down. Now, I have to say I am proud of Kerri. She held her cool, especially as a first year teacher. She told him to clean himself up the best he could and asked us what to do. We told her to call his mom on her cell phone. It is for moments like this that cell phones were invented. When Kerri checked up on John to ask for his number, she saw he was now covered from head to toe with poop and sobbing with embarrassment! (The second grade version of cleaning himself up.) Of course, he didn’t know his phone number so we spent the next half hour talking to the school, then the mom, then keeping the other kids away so he wouldn’t be made fun of the rest of his life. The mom decided to meet us at our next destination with clean clothes so John could finish out the fieldtrip. Thank goodness for the dad who happened to drive and happened to be a police officer and driving his unmarked SUV full of emergency supplies. We took off as much of the offensive clothing as we modestly could, wrapped him in a towel, and went on our merry, if slightly fragrant, way. Mom met us at the farm and all was fine. Thank goodness the rest of the trip was uneventful, if you can every call a field trip with 80 seven-year-olds, a talking tomato, sheep, a herding sheepdog, a video on how pig products are used in our lives, a black light demonstration on how germs are spread, making living necklaces, and sulfuric bathrooms uneventful.

Words of wisdom heard on the field trip:

• “Oh look at the green car! Someone has too much money.”
• “We are at the country!” (Costco is less than a block away.)
• Yelled out the bus window to the neighboring bus, “The whole way here I saw my foot in the mirror!”
• “The horse is eight.” “Did he get baptized?”
• “I have a dog. It lives at my grandparents’ house cause my mom won’t let it live at my house and get it dirty.”
• “My favorite part was the mouse I found in the garbage can! I kept poking at it with a stick.”