an unlikely field trip

Anyone who has been invited to view the slideshow of our yard's face-lift will be able to note that we moved quite a lot of dirt, sod, rocks, brick, old concrete, rebar, railroad ties and a full cubic foot of broken glass (with the exception of the bottle from the local dairy back in 1950-something that we managed to extract whole). We ended up with a rather large pile headed for the dump. Due to the difficulty of moving so much debris, we decided to rent a local hardware store truck and caravan out to the dump and work together. The kids, never having actually seen a dump before, were ecstatic to go on the trip. "Why do we have to go? Can't daddy just do it alone? I don't waaaaaanaaaa!"

Mid-wail, the garbage truck pulls up in front of our house. The guys waved to the kids and asked their permission to take the trash away for us. For some reason, the hopper is always full when it gets to our house and they squish it (as it dribbles messily out of the truck into the street...) engine roaring, pistons skreeling, contents bursting. All three of them watched, wide-eyed as the garbage truck did it's thing. Oh, perfect. I snapped into teacher mode immediately. Before the smelly backside of the garbage truck was out of sight, I pulled out a dog-eared, well-loved copy of an awesome book: "I STINK!" by Kate & Jim McMullan. It describes in fascinating kid-like detail exactly what the garbage truck does. It lists the parts of the truck and the jobs of the sanitation workers and it addresses the most serious kid-inquisitive topic of them all: "what is in there and where is it going?" The book works it's way alphabetically from apple cores through zipped up ziti with zucchini accompanied by accurately watercolored drawings of the trash contents. NOW they really were excited to follow the trash truck to the dump.

Once there, we watched the trucks drive onto the scales to weigh how much trash they were bringing. We couldn't see the numbers, but the kids were fascinated by the ever-slightly-swaying platform. Next we drove past the place where you dump just wood and yard debris like tree branches, grass clippings, and leaves. From where we sat they could see the mulchers spewing piles of chopped and splintered wood higher than a bus and three times as long. We talked about how they recycle those things and re-use them to put wood chips on the playground at school. We continued around a curve and found the concrete dump. We unloaded most of the truck and the kids dutifully stayed in the van, watching out the open door as we added our cinderblocks and chunked concrete to the piles of flagstone, bricks and paving stones. We buckled the kids back in and followed a winding dirt road that kept going up, up, up....all along the left side we saw lots of grass and pumps used to alleviate the pressure of the building methane, I'm sure. At the top we reached the actual dump and the kids were thrilled to see an actual garbage truck emptying its hopper onto the ground. They watched as a bulldozer covered Mount Trash-O-Rama with dirt and let the next truck in to do the same.

They complained about the smell a bit and we reviewed what, exactly, we were smelling according to our book. All the way home they recited different specimens found in the book's trash cans and then they spun off to tell what they had most recently put in the trash can themselves. All in all it was an extremely successful morning. We finished our job, the kids had fun, there were no complaints the whole drive there or back, and they all volunteered to take out the trash when we got home. Normal, we are not.