The Trifecta of Gross

My two oldest girlfriends, Kim and Robyn, were here for the weekend. We did the touristy stuff, talked so much that I think my laryngitis might come back, and ate lots of cupcakes and drank lots of wine. It wasn't as much a girls weekend as a weekend with them hanging with my family. Since Nico is still breastfed, he had to be along or I'd have to pump. Finding a place to pump in the city is even more challenging than finding a bathroom that doesn't make you want to retch, so Nico became a girl for the weekend. Well, you can't explain that to an almost 3 year old who is going on 13, so Alexandra and Adam tagged along, too. But, since Robyn and Kim are awesome and have families and get it, they were cool with it all.

We took on Top of the Rock at 8pm on Saturday night. Alexandra was being exceeding good, so instead of taking her home for bed Adam and her came along. While we stopped mid-level to pee, Alexandra was crawling around under some benches and came up with a circular piece of something. I thought it was a piece of veggie booty, but no, it was a piece of CHEWED GUM.

This gum had been chewed, rolled into a ball, dropped onto the ground, under a bench in a place where hundreds of people visit every day. It was gray in color, covered with dirt, and Alexandra immediately fell in love with it. She HAD to hold onto it with all her energy. It went in her pocket, out of her pocket, and then she started to KISS it. Yes, kiss it. I could not wrestle it from her hands without a full-blown tantrum occurring (keep in mind that she'd had only a 1/2 hour nap in the stroller that day and it was about 9pm at that time, her normal bedtime being 7:30-8).

And with that, I had to let the gross gum go. I had to let her snuggling up to it, whisper sweet nothings into it, and rub it all over her fingers. Eventually it got dropped and she forgot about it, but not until we were back on street level and I went to retrieve it from her coat pocket while Kim took her potty.

But that was the perfect trifecta of gross: chewed gum, found on a floor of an insanely public space, meeting the lips of my child. Ewwwwww.