Alley

Hm. That was an interesting experience. I typed "alley" into Google Images, and it pulled up all kinds of things - pictures of Kirstie Alley, nasty, soft-porn pictures of girls named Alley, an alley cat, and maps of Tornado Alley. Interesting.

Anyways, we have an alley behind our house, and it looks nothing like the alley above. The alley above is apparently in Verona, Italy. Ours is very ugly and dry and gravelley. And my nasty neighbors have thrown a bunch of stuff in the alley, because they are too lazy to put it into the dumpster we share. But the garbagemen won't take it away, because it's not in the dumpster. So they're having a little battle. Ah, the neighbors. How I love them. :(

If you go from my backyard into the alley and walk for about two houses, you will reach a park. This is the park where Dylan gets dropped off by the bus after school. I have tried several times to meet him there and walk home with him, but the dang bus is either way too early or way too late. And Dylan changes the way he walks home every day. Sometimes he takes the road to the east of us, sometimes the road to the west of us, and sometimes he takes the alley. So I'll go at the appointed time, and I'll just have missed him, but not know it, and we'll miss each other, because he'll be walking home one of his skewompus ways. Or I'll go, like, 30 seconds too late, but not know it, and I will have missed him again. It's so frustrating.

Micah and Sadie are usually napping when Dylan gets home from school, and since it's two houses away, I feel okay getting Dylan at the park and leaving the kids in their beds for five minutes. Maybe that's wrong of me, but I don't think it's worth waking them up out of a sound sleep to stand in the cold for five minutes. But if I've missed Dylan somehow - if his bus is early or late - he'll walk in the house and get all scared and confused that I'm not there and start screaming at the top of his lungs and crying, which of course wakes up Sadie and Micah. I've finally stopped trying to meet him at the park. I've only managed to catch him there once. So Dylan now knows to walk straight home. He has a couple of friends who walk home with him from the bus, which makes me feel a little bit better about it.

Anyways, back when I was still trying to syncronize the bus and myself, Sadie happened to be awake, and I said, "Hey, do you want to go get Dylan from the bus with me?" And of course, she said yes.

So we're walking through the backyard to our back gate, and Sadie says, "Where we doh-ing?" [She has a very bad short-term memory.]

I say, "We're getting Dylan."

"Why we doh-ing dis way?"

"It's faster if we go through the alley."

Sadie stops dead in her tracks, her eyes wide with fear. "We are doh-ing to det an owie??

Alley... owie... You can see the mixup there. So I hugged her and told her that the alley is where our garbage can is, that we are not going to get any type of owies, I promise. So she went with me. And we missed Dylan by like a minute. Sigh.