The scariest 30 feet...

My little 2 1/2 year old is getting so big. Talking up a storm, learning new things every day, makes me think it won't be long before she's out the door for kindergarten, grade school, high school, prom, college, moving out... and I can't even fathom right now sticking her on a bus in a few years and saying "see you at three"... makes me queasy just thinking about it.

So my siblings and I use to live right around the corner from our grade school. We were labeled "walkers" (aka nerds) and the closest we ever got to the inside of the school bus was the occasional field trip. Looking back now we were probably the lucky ones, living so close to home, not having to deal with any extra bully troubles, but at the time we thought we were somehow getting jipped out of something fun. The one plus side to the deal was that we did get giant whiffs of the diesel fumes as the buses zoomed by our house, which I have to admit I still rather like to this day.

Now my sister and I use to walk home together, and from the corner of the school's cyclone fence to the closest corner of my parents yard was literally like 20-30 feet. This mind you was in a quiet little peaceful neighborhood where nothing scary ever really happened. We however thought this the most terrifying stretch of road anywhere in the continental United States. We had been warned as most kids to not talk to strangers, and forced to watch a couple of cheesy after school specials about stranger safety... but with a dad that liked to spook us all the time and caused great panic just for fun made our active little imaginations believe that any car, bike, mail truck, ice cream truck, and especially "rapist vans" were out to get us. (You know, rapist vans, the kind that have no windows or doors except maybe the back that look all beat up - you better run like crazy if you see one of them).

So we would start at the corner gate and would first look in every direction for cars. Then we would book it as fast as our little legs would carry us (in complete terror mind you) to our parents yard, through the tree line, over the bark, leap over the shrubs, to the safety of the front door. This was a daily ritual, I'm sad to report.

It makes my husband laugh so hard now when I tell him of our running, since he's seen the shortness of that stretch of road and it's literally a stone's throw away. Now at first today when I was thinking of how scary it would be to put my future little 5-year-old on a bus and wave goodbye... Now I'm thinking hey maybe it's a very good thing she's not going to be a "walker"