Not Funny at the Time! :)

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Retrospectively Funny.”

So, I decided to try a writing prompt just for fun. Today’s prompt was to describe something that wasn’t funny at the time, but now looking back on it, you can see the humor. Am I the only one who feels like this could be half my life?? This prompt hardly narrows down things to write about for me. 🙂 But, I picked one event that occurred during my pregnancy with my second child. Here goes…

I worked as a Pediatric ICU nurse at Egleston Children’s Hospital in Atlanta. Every year, the hospital had an evening for employees at the Atlanta zoo after normal hours. So had this happened on a regular trip to the zoo, it wouldn’t have been quite as embarrassing, but of course it happened when the zoo playground was full of my coworkers. My daughter was three and she wanted to play on the large wooden ‘ark’ on the playground and scurried to the very top. My husband and I were sitting on a bench adjacent to the structure visiting with some people from the hospital when we heard screaming.

At least twenty kids came running out of the ark, some of them holding their arms over their heads. We heard one kid shout, “Somebody peed!! And it’s coming down!” Looking up at the top of the ark, we see our daughter standing by the wheel with that “oopsie” look on her little cherubic face. I gestured to my enormous pregnant belly and asked my husband to retrieve our daughter from the top level, as she was just frozen in place. He asked for a bag to put over his head, but when I had none to offer, he gamely brought our little one down for a change of clothes. Needless to say, it wasn’t funny at the time!

The zoo is completely different these days, and I don’t think the old ark structure still even stands in the children’s play area. But somewhere in the world, there are young men and women who may remember an evening 19 years ago when the pee came down from the top of the ark, forcing them to scurry to safety!