Disrupting Nature

On Sunday, the three of us went to my favorite playground in Ambridge. I like it because it has things that you can spin on and an electronic game thingie, but also because the actual park is pretty run down and creepy. After playing for awhile, I made them go for a walk with me to one of the pavilions deep inside the park. Seriously, you just expect to hear Jason Voorhees fire up the ol’ chainsaw at any moment, it’s those kinds of woods.

Anyway, Chooch and I were still riding high on the fumes of Saturday night’s waitress incident, so we were giddy. No, that’s an understatement. We were some horrible wreckage of a classroom full of giddy tweens  molted with the obnoxious bray of Fran Drescher and Henry was quite literally swatting us away from him like gnats. Chooch was whaling pine cones at him and kicking him in the ass and I was laughing uncontrollably while periodically body-slamming him.

Yet Henry mostly just kept walking at a peaceful pace, hands in his pockets, admiring the foliage. Occasionally, he would ask us to stop and try to give Chooch threatening glares in an effort to regrip his handle on the situation, which would only make us laugh harder. Chooch threw a particularly large piece of bark at him and we decided to run, like Henry would ever chase us.

The trail back to the car splits into two: the upper trail is in better condition than the lower trail which meets back up with the other trail about half a mile or so down the way.  Chooch and I decided to take the lower trail, like Henry wasn’t going to notice — I was pretty much swathed head to toe in fluorescent pink scene girl threads. “Just keep running!” Chooch panted, and so we ran the entire way (which is a lot of running if you’re like me, a non-runner) and then climbed a hill where we hid in a wheat field, which Henry later told me isn’t wheat. (THEN WHAT IS IT!?)

Yes! We just spent 20 minutes shitting all over Henry’s authority! Now let’s make him think he lost us, too!

It was taking FOREVER for Henry to finally walk by, at which point I started wondering if he knew of a shorter way to get back to the car and if so, did he leave us there to teach us a lesson, because that would be JUST LIKE HIM.

“I bet he’s too busy looking at the grass and all that shit,” I whispered to Chooch, rolling my eyes. “‘Oh, look a berry!'” I said in my best Henry voice, which is actually just my Bullwinkle impression. Chooch started cracking up and I shushed him because look, dickhead, you just made me run half a mile and climb a fucking hill to hide from this bastard, so we are gon’ be quiet AND HIDE.

But then some hawk-like bird soared overhead and I said, “Oh shit, you just KNOW Henry is like, ‘OMG look at that bird!’ and wishing he had bird-watching glasses,” which made Chooch lose his shit all over again.

“I think I peed my pants again!” he cried in laughter.

“Ew, ‘again’?!” I asked in disgust.

“Yeah, I peed when we were throwing things at Daddy, too.”

OMG we are so much alike.

But he eventually emerged from the woods and we both came barrelling down the hill toward him. Chooch ended up falling off a small drop at the bottom and landed right on his stomach, but he sprung right back up and continued to scream and hassle Henry. THATS MY BOY. I asked Henry why it took him so long to walk back and he admitted that once he realized he couldn’t hear us “giggling like assholes,” he figured he better walk back along the lower trail to make sure we hadn’t fallen into a hole.

Honestly, that’s what he did!

I guess that must mean HENRY CARES ABOUT US.

Man, wildlife really  hated us that day.