a poodle

this evening while hugh and i buried our feet in the freshly tilled sand at the park, we were suddenly stormed by a giant runaway dog. remembering it now, i would almost swear to you that i first felt the ground rumble before i saw the enormous poodle barrelling in our direction. with only the type of quickness that is born the second one becomes a parent...i scooped hugh out of the sandpit...wrapped every one of my limbs around him and prepared for impact. to my shock...the dog cut to the side missing us by a hair. before i could even make sense...he came at us again...and whoosh...the same maneuver as before...missed us. i tried to look for an escape...but as i turned my head all i could make out was a blurry curly creature flying in the air with only one landing pad in mind...my back. but alas, he missed. as i opened my dry mouth to scold him...and before any words screeched out...i heard, "weeeheeee! do it again! do it again! hahhahahaha!".

i looked in my arms and saw pure delight coming from every part of hugh's body.
i looked at the poodle only to see the very same pure delight.
the only sound i managed to eek out was, "oh".

the rest of the evening was spent playing a new game called, runaway pup. it goes something like this: "mommy, you stand there." followed by hugh running at top speed toward my legs and at the last second sparing me impact by leaping to one side with a dramatic fall to the ground...ending in fits of laughter.

well, i had planned on wrapping up this post with some sort of clever quip about learning from animals...or something about animal vs. child instinct....or something about something.
but i'm not that clever...and to be quite frank, i'm still getting over the embarrassment of letting a goofy old poodle nearly get the best of me.