Mud Mania

I took my daughter and a friend to an event called Mud Mania this weekend. It's essentially a 70-yard mud pile, with obstacles to climb over, slide down, and swim through. In other words, it's kid paradise.

While adult women would pay hundreds of dollars for a mud treatment at a spa, they still wouldn't have as much mud on them as the kids at this event. Some of them -- and not just boys -- were covered from head to toe. On the way, I told my daughter that she'd have mud in places she didn't even know she had places, and she did. Fortunately, there were showers available for the kids to clean off before heading for the inflatable rides nearby, then returning for another slosh through the mud.

While standing around watching, two things caught my attention. The first was a young boy, maybe 4 or 5 years old, who was sitting in the pool of muddy water, covered from the neck down. At first I didn't notice the look on his face, but when I looked a second time, it was unmistakable -- this kid was peeing. Any adult who has ever been to the pool with little kids knows that look. I mentioned it to the guy next to me along the fence and he immediately said, "Oh, yeah, that kid's peeing in the mud." Fortunately, my kid was nowhere nearby.

Later, at the end of the mud trough, several kids from one family emerged together and started laughing when the youngest boy saw someone's underpants lying on the ground. As he pointed them out, their mother warned him not to touch the underwear. The counter-argument came from his older brother, who did all of us older brothers proud by telling his younger sibling to pick them up and "throw the underpants at someone!" This idea was just too great an opportunity for the boy to resist. There followed a short round of muddy underpants tossing and hysterical laughter before the mother stepped in and restored order.

I couldn't help but wonder if the underwear from the second story belonged to the kid from the first story.