Toilet Koalas and Booze: What Happens in a Pandemic Stays in a Pandemic

This morning, when Dear Sweet Son and I went for our morning HyperHund walk, we ran into a little girl and her dad, who was holding a tote bag.  The little one was about two years old and gave me a huge smile.

"Hi there, sweetie!" I said enthusiastically, "Look at you with that big smile on your face!"

"Oh yeah!" the dad answered cheerfully, without skipping a beat, "She's smiling because we're walking to the liquor store and she gets a piece of candy when we get there!"

Now, you may be thinking that I might secretly be judging that dad for walking his toddler to the liquor store at 9:00 a.m. with an empty tote bag, ripe for the filling, but let me tell you something:  in a pandemic, anything goes.

Dude clearly needs a drink by 10:00 a.m.   I'm not judging.

Kid needs candy at 9:00.  No judgment (except if you spell judgment this way: "judgement," because then I'm totally judging you for sucking at spelling "judgment" the way I prefer it spelled.  Don't even ask me about the Oxford comma).

Walking your toddler to the liquor store for a fun family outing?  Nope.  Still not judging.

You know why? 

Because I'm an old mom, I've been home with one kid and no adults for over five months, and if I actually enjoyed drinking, which I no longer do but recently I've felt tempted, I'd be filling up that bottomless tote bag with the cheapest Boone's strawberry wine, too.

I now totally, totally have grown to appreciate the value of YouTube as a child entertainment.  It's like a magical wonderland of videos that will keep kids riveted for hours.  Hamsters in a maze of swinging hammers?  Check!  Middle-aged men playing ecstatically with kids' toys and turning their entire houses into box forts?  We've got that covered, too!  No judgment, old man.  Play with that sack o' Shopkins!  You do you!

In case you are now secretly judging me (which is cool - have fun! - no judgment on my part!), please note that we also do very educational and wholesome family activities such as going to the forest preserve to chuck clods of mud into a pond, rolling down the same hill fifty times in a row, catching and releasing probably-parasite-laden snails in the creek, and walking the same path around the neighborhood every morning.

We also do school-related learning things such as whine about homeschooling for several hours a day and then actually homeschool for a few minutes, too.

Every evening, we have a fun, family-bonding ritual in which my son pretends to go to bed and then finds eleventy-billion reasons not to actually be in bed.  These creatively thought-out and emotional-stamina-building excuses include: drinks, bathroom breaks, requested-but-not-received snacks, and being terrified by toilet koalas.

You may wonder why there are koalas in our toilet anyway.  Hint: there aren't.  

At some point, DSS was shown a YouTube video of a fighting koalas by an adult who had not anticipated said koalas to vocalize in such a horrifying manner, and from then on, he (DSS, not the koala) was sure that a koala would sneak out of the toilet pipes at night, climb into the toilet, and sneakily attack the nearest rump that dared poise itself onto the seat.

Pretty much imagine the above video scenario, but with the koala aggressively wrestling and gnawing your butt and trying to drag you, not down a tree, but down into its sewer-pipe home, and you'll understand why this is actually a very legitimate fear.

For months after watching the video, Dear Sweet Son refused to go to the bathroom without clinging to my hand like a limpet in need of Xanax.

Luckily, this phase has mostly passed, but occasionally, the toilet koala does make a surprise encore reappearance when DSS is trying to avoid going to bed.

So yeah.  Rock on, Liquor Store Totebag Dad.  I hope the Boone's or Zima (do they still make that stuff?  If not, they should.) was everything you dreamed and needed it to be.  See you at noon for your refill when we walk around the block again!