Heart Attacks

Part of our trip to San Diego was to visit the USS Midway, an aircraft city, I mean carrier.

Um. It’s big.

The Things loved it—partly because they got to pilot immovable objects.

However, on the movable object side of things, you may notice Thing 2 in the above picture walking away from Grandpa Photog, Daddy, and Thing 1. That was a theme for the weekend.

Here, let me give you a heart attack.

See Thing 2 at the 4th of July Padres game? (We won.) Doesn’t he look quiet and calm? The picture of a good 6-1/2 year old boy who won’t do anything wrong and always listens.

Don’t be taken in by the cute cuteness.

Here’s what happened 20 minutes later: Thing 2 asks to go to the bathroom. Daddy goes with. Mom talks to Mother in Law. Chatting away, I’m facing away from our aisle. Suddenly my MIL yells out for Thing 2. I look over and there he is, trotting down the aisle towards the field. He turns, sees us, grins, and comes back to his seat.

“Where’s Daddy?” I ask.

He looks sheepish and after more applied verbal pressure admits that Daddy is still back in the bathroom.

I am not a runner—I never was and never will be—but I took off like I had a starting block under my heels. Stairs? Smoked. Distance? Smoked. I was on fire, if I do say so myself. Luckily my husband had only started to have a heart attack.

“I have him,” were, I think, the first words out of my mouth.

So.

The next day we went to the Wild Animal Park. He knew he was busted. He knew he had one more chance to prove he could listen, stay close, and not just leave. In this case it wasn’t wandering off, you understand, it was  taking off. I imagine he wanted to be a “big boy” etc, and we discussed how this was not what big boys do—Thing 1 doesn’t wander around the ballpark on his own, yada yada. We explained that we weren’t worried about him (hell, he found his way to us in a stadium). He did launch into tears when realizing that the only reason he made it back was because his Gramma saw him. We had him think about what he would have done if he’d made it to the field and hadn’t found his seat.

That got him.

We thought.

It’s a hard line to parse with kids, no? How much info is too much? “There are bad people out there who might try to take you away from us!” is both true and really terrifying. I think we may have actually gone that far this time (we trust YOU…it’s the other people…). I can’t recall for sure. It was pretty fraught at the time.

So. Wild Animals.

Here’s Thing 1 with the requisite lions.

And here’s Thing 2’s new backpack leash.

He blew his one chance at lunch by wandering off to find Thing 1 at the table he was holding down while we were all ordering. The ordering turned out to be quite a thing for me with the whole gluten mishegas. Evidently Thing 2 got tired of standing, so he just left while I was talking to the girl at one counter, his dad was talking to a guy at a different counter and the g’rents at another (the fung was definitely not shui at this particular eating venue).

It took ages to find him this time and we were really getting worried when he wandered up all blasé blasé.

End of freedom.

I couldn’t find one of those kid-leash-contraptions that would fit a 6-1/2 year old. Gramma, who is an engineer, did a great job, though. Cute lemur backpack with straps held together in the front by Wild Animal Park shoelaces tied end-to-end. Brilliant.

Problem?

He liked it.

Good news: he’s been better ever since, even without the leash. And he’s been voluntarily holding my hand for awhile now.

But we know we were lucky. He might understand that now too…