A Walk in the Woods

WE MADE IT BACK to the trail head outhouse before Andy messed in his cute Spider-Man tighty-whities.

But once we got there, my boy refused to do the very thing that prompted our about face a half mile into our Saturday hike at the Brainerd Lake Recreation Area –a spot in Roosevelt National Forest near Ward, Colo.

Andy, 3, cried and cried until his face turned red.

Then, he started shouting that he wanted to go home.

Go home?!?

We just drove about an hour from our home on the flats below to these woods close to the treeline to regroup as a family.

My husband, David, had been working at a trade show in Portland, Oreg., all week while I stayed back with our three kiddies and tried to work a little bit, too.

He and I both felt spent and in need of an easy day outside with the boys.

For us, that means going for a walk in the woods where we can free the two older ones — Andy and Carl, 5 — without reminding them to use “walking feet” or “inside voices.”

Not 20 minutes before the outhouse debacle, old snow in the clefts below the ridge line caught Andy’s eye as we moseyed along.

“Mama? Can we touch it, that snow?” he said.

What a sweet moment with Andy — my little blondie standing in the September sunshine wearing a big hat and an orange fleece pullover embroidered with a hammer, saw and screwdriver on the front pocket.

Parenting young children is so bittersweet.

Every day I flip-flop between delighting in these cuddly gifts and wondering if I’m really up to the inevitable hassles that come with each one.

For instance, I put three strips of toilet paper on the outhouse toilet seat in the women’s restroom before gently placing this budding nature lover on them.

So far, so good.

Then, Andy began to kick and wail, and I began to yell “Just GO!!!”

Given the latrine’s ripe, end-of-summer odors, I stood with one foot in the stall and one foot out with the door open.

I don’t even want to know what hikers returning to cars in the small, packed parking lot thought about my parenting.

At these times, sayings I usually never use — such as “Shove it” — cross my mind.

So, I try to not think about what other people think because I don’t want to say things like that to anyone — even though this situation made me feel like saying something like that to my own kid.

Instead, I stomped off and asked David to take over.

My husband, still saddled with the backpack holding our 21-pound, 21-month-old Ray, took my place at the open door then.

Andy continued wailing and then crawled off the toilet seat.

I’m a bit of a germaphobe.

So, witnessing all this toilet seat touching after my careful toilet seat precautions sort of did me in.

I gave up on resolving the potty crisis, and we hit the trail again expecting that in 500 feet we would turn around to repeat the same maddening scene.

Instead, the afternoon improved.

Somehow it improved, which reminds me that I am not in charge of how everything goes — a delusion I entertain more as a parent than ever before.

The kids soon ran ahead on the trail as David and I originally hoped.

Then, they found an old cart, one likely used by miners more than a century ago to remove slag while searching for precious metal.

All three kids played there. David almost fell asleep leaning against a rock. And I wondered again at how many turns one day may take.

After bath time that evening, Andy used the toilet and showed me what he left behind — waste he calls either a “daddy snake” or a “baby snake” depending on its size.

“Good job, Andy,” I said. “But why didn’t you do this daddy snake in the outhouse instead of fussing so much there?”

“I was scared that I would fall in,” he said.