Bathroom Duty

We went to the local high school football game tonight. My brother is in town visiting, so he was along with us and we had our neighbor boy along too. Being that we live in Texas and all there were quite a few other people at the game too (if you know Texas football at all, you understand the vast understatement I'm making here!).

Sometime after the first quarter, Bridget announced that she needed to use the bathroom. I told her I would take her, and then asked if anyone else needed to go. Both my boys and Blake said yes, so I headed off with four kids. Sam grabbed the three boys before we all walked off and very seriously told them, "Now you boys stay together. Nobody wander off. And when you go into the bathroom, you go in together and come out together." They all gave him a "Yes sir!" and off we went.

The boys headed down the bleachers ahead of me, and then turned to go down the next set before Bridget and I could catch up with them. We were delayed in the crush of people and by the time we got down to the bottom, the older two boys were gone and I found Jonah standing all alone in the middle of a big crowd of people...looking completely lost.

I caught up with him and asked where the other boys were. He was pretty upset and didn't have any idea where they had gone. We headed over to the boys bathroom and waited, and sure enough, Henry and Blake came bouncing out of there momentarily.

Grabbing Henry by the arm, I told him he needed to walk Jonah into the bathroom, wait for him and then come out and talk with me.

Bridget reminded me at this point that she really needed to go to the bathroom, but I felt like the more pressing issue was to talk with the boys about what had happened. So we waited for the boys to come out.

When they finally all three came out, I lined them up beside a post to talk with them. I was pretty far into my lecturing about listening to instructions, sticking together, strangers, obeying and everything else (I was on a pretty good roll at that point!) when someone tapped me on the arm.

"Um, excuse me, but did you have a little girl with you?"

Frantically looking around, I noticed that Bridget was no longer in my sight.

He proceeded to tell me that he had seen her walk into the men's restroom and that he would go check on her. He popped his head in there, then leaned out and waved me into the restroom. Bridget had gone right in and sat down in one of the stalls, not even noticing all the boys running in and out of there!

I grabbed her by the hand and dragged her out of there and into the ladies restroom. "Mom, why are we going in here? I already went potty!" my three year old insisted. We washed her hands and rushed back out to reunite with the three giggling boys.

Next time I'm not volunteering for bathroom duty.