Watch your step

Our suburb is full of dog shit.  It’s on the grass up and down our street, where the footpaths should be.  When I go for a run, walk, waddle, it’s on the bike track, around the playground, it’s even in our backyard.  We don’t have a dog.  We have kids. I have to deal with enough poo already. 

My 2 year old is like a magnet for it.  Every time we go out, if there’s doggie doo anywhere, he’ll step in it.  I’m extra vigilant when we walk to kindy, but his magnetic poo powers are no match for my sharp eye.  There’s often a fresh one just outside the kindy gates, hiding on a patch of grass next to the footpath.  If he cuts the corner, he steps in it.  None of the other kindy kids, mums, dads and siblings seem to have this problem.  He’s the only one, and as a result, I’m on constant poo watch. 

Sometimes I don’t know where it comes from, but if it’s anywhere, he’ll step in it.  I deal with it thus: I carefully remove his little shoes, wrap them in paper, put them in a plastic bag, tie it up tightly and place it under the house in the laundry sink, for later cleaning.  When the sink is full of plastic bags containing shitty shoes, I throw them all in the bin.  There’s no way I’m actually going to clean them, no matter how cute the shoes might be.  Thank god for second hand kids shoes and hand me down sandals.

I have often wondered, what kind of people let their dogs crap all over the streets, and around childrens’ playgrounds? Or is it lone dogs, roaming the streets unaccompanied? One night while jogging, I found out.   I caught a dog in the act, with his person watching.  The dog was a big scary attack-style dog.  They were walking down the footpath ahead of me, when the dog stopped to do his business on the nature strip.  His person, holding the leash, made no move to poop-scoop, just waited till he finished, then kept walking.  As I passed them, I felt my face twist into a snarl (more aimed at the person than the dog).  The dog leaped at me, growling fiercely with teeth bared, but the leash held him back.  I muttered something along the lines of “Yeah? That’s exactly how I feel!”.

So we’re moving.  Not because of the dog shit, we really need a bigger house.  But just the same, I’m hoping to move to a suburb that’s not covered in doggy doo.  Today we looked at a bunch of houses.  There was one house we really liked: it has wooden floors and a veranda, with a big park out front. There’s an extra toilet (my main criteria) and a fully fenced yard.  But there, in the backyard, was a shiny dog shit, greeting us ominously from the grass.  I grabbed my two year old and steered him indoors before he could step in it.  Then I checked the perimeter for breaches, but I can’t work out how a dog could have got into the yard.  I’m hoping it’s not a bad omen, (although it certainly feels like a bad joke) because it’s the only house we liked.  We’ve put in an application, and I’m hoping for two things: that we get the house, and that there’s no more dog shit.