It may not seem like it, but I try my best not to talk about poop very often.  Some stories, however, demand to be told.  Yesterday afternoon, I decided we would all go out for pizza because everyone in the family loves it and we usually have a good time.  There are several pizza joints in town that sell a variety of styles, so we never get tired of it.  I could honestly eat pizza every day and be perfectly happy.  I would be extremely obese, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices to achieve a goal.  Anyway, we decided to go to the Mellow Mushroom this time.  This place is a throwback to the late sixties and early seventies.  The decor is psychedelic and the staff looks like a collection of people who got lost on the way home from Woodstock and decided to set up shop in the center of downtwon Winston-Salem instead of losing their buzz and going home.  The pizza is delicious. The salads are great.  We  had a wonderful dinner and the boys were so well-behaved, it was almost creepy.  Normally, they get in trouble multiple times over the course of a restaurant meal, but Gabriel was quiet and Colby didn't throw his silverware on the floor.  They both ate well and even stayed quiet while we were waiting for our food.  It was going to be the best night out in a long time.

 After dinner, we walked back down the street toward the van, which was parked acoss the street and down about a block.  Some asshat™ almost ran over Gabriel when we crossed at the crosswalk because he ignored the 'walk' signal, but I glared at him so hard, he stopped.  Hopefully he felt like an asshat™.  The van was parked right outside of a small park that's nestled in-between the art museum and some high-rise apartments. Attached to the museum is an Italian restaurant with outside seating, and across the street from the park is a church.  There's an amphitheater-like set of stairs that drops down to a large fountain at the bottom.  Inside the fountain is a cool-looking rock formation with waterfalls and a wooden bridge.  The kids are drawn to it like yuppies to Starbucks.  We weren't in any hurry, so we decided to go down to the fountain and play around.  We were having a good time when all of a sudden, Gabriel said 'I have to go poop!'  So we gathered up the boys and started heading back.  Of course, both boys started whining because they didn't want to go, but Gabriel started heading back to the van on his own.  Colby, on the other hand, tried to get away from us, so we spent a few minutes running him down.  After I caught him and started carrying him toward the car, a process that only took about a minute, we turned around to see Gabriel at the top of the stairs with his pants down, squatting slightly.

Steph and I both jumped to the same conclusion and yell-whispered “Gabriel! Pull your pants back up!  You can do that when we get home.”  We both looked over at the restaurant to make sure no one had seen our son exposing himself at the park and then hurriedly made our way over to him. We are always discovering new talents that Gabriel has and we are constantly surprised by a good majority of his actions, but we have not been this surprised in a long time.  In the course of that short minute, Gabriel had managed to poop on the ground in the middle of a public park without being seen.  Lying beside him on the ground was the product of his efforts and it was substantial.  How he managed to get that out in such a short time I will never know, but I have to admit that, through the shock, I was a little proud and more than a little impressed.  The more immediate reaction was embarassment and fear, though.  After a quick look around again to make sure no one was looking, we made him pick it up with a paper bag and throw it away.  He did a good job of picking it up, but then he kept trying to shake it loose from the bag into the trash until we told him we weren't keeping the bag.  Steph and I stumbled over each other trying to get him into he van.  It was more like a terrorist abduction than a parent getting his kid in the car, but we had to get the hell out of there. All the way home we lectured him on why he shouldn't do things like that and I doubt he heard a word.