Its Gotta Be The Shoes
It is back to school time, and back to school time means our family needs shoes. I’m not sure how many pairs of shoes we have purchased in the last couple of weeks, but I’m pretty sure we just outfitted an entire baseball team. It hasn't helped that adult's shoes are wearing out at the same time as the kids.
Most of the shoe shopping has been done without kids around, but last week for some reason we thought it would be a good idea to take everyone shoe shopping after work. No matter how many times we venture out in public with all four kids it always seems like a good idea until about 3 seconds after we walk in the door of whatever store we are shopping in. It is at that moment that a voice in my head says, “O yeah. That’s why we don’t do this.”
The Demolitions Expert spent the entire time in the store indiscriminately opening shoe boxes, rearranging the merchandise in a way that I’m sure made a few employees want to quit at the end of the day, and generally bucking the trend of her not getting her way.
The Ballerina tried on a wide variety of shoes, but apparently the entire store was composed of shoes that fit into one of two categories. In the first category were shoes that she liked, but were not in her size. In the second category were shoes that she did not like, no matter what size was available.
The Zoologist, to his credit, was flexible. When I told him he could not
have the shoes with the Simon Electronic Memory Game built in he rolled with the punches pretty well. He found a pair of shoes, and then after I took one for the team and took the girls and the two-month-old, near the end of his rope Jedi to the car, he found the second pair he needed.
At the end of the festivities I decided to give my lovely wife, who was stressed and possibly hearing voices in her head, a small break. I told her to take my car home while I took the four crazies through the Chick-Fil-A drive thru and then came home.
Some people (mostly those without kids) might think that allowing three kids to eat a fast-food meal in their car would cause a big enough mess that they would never do it. If you are one of those people I say, “Good for you.” When you have four kids contained in a small space there are times you would gladly pay for Bobby Flay to serve roast duck in the van if it meant getting 75% of them to occupy their mouths with something other than talking, screaming, arguing, and otherwise verbally assaulting your ear drums.
We made our run through the Chick-Fil-A drive thru, then I pulled over and distributed the food and drinks. I got back in the van and headed home. After twenty feet I pulled into another parking spot because the Ballerina said she wasn’t getting any milk out of the small milk jug that came with her meal. After a quick inspection I discovered that was because she had drank all of the milk - in the time it took me to drive twenty feet. I handed her the bottle of water she fortunately had in the van and we continued our journey.
I made it out of the parking log and about 200 yards down the road before I had to pull over because the Demolitions Expert dropped her bag of food. I got out, picked it up, and handed it back to her. At this point I began to think about home the way I suspect a shipwreck survivor thinks about home when they have been drifting aimlessly in a lifeboat for a few days. Thankfully we didn’t have to make any more stops, although I did have to drive while reaching back to help the Demo Expert take off her socks. Apparently she suddenly realized that wearing socks was incredibly offensive to her people.
Eventually we made it home. We’ll probably all go shoe shopping again in a decade or so. I hope these last.