"A Trip to Wal-Mart" or "How Far is it to Insanity?"

While I have been under the weather, I just haven't been able to do my regular mom routine. I must admit - our food storage is significantly depleted and getting milk at diapers at Costco has been about as much as I've accomplished the last few weeks. Don't even get me started on the house. However, I've been feeling much better this week and decided today was the day to attack a full schedule, including my dreaded trip to Wal-mart.

After a rather uneventful laundry/kitchen/tidying-up morning, the boys and I drove to Salt Lake to meet Jon at the bike shop. We needed to get our bikes tuned for the trip to St. George this weekend and traded cars and stuff. The boys were pretty well-behaved there. No major events. Life seemed to be getting back to normal. Then the drive home happened.

As I mentioned, we swapped cars, so that meant the boys and I were piling ourselves into the smallish sedan. It's a great car and we love it, but honestly I had forgotten how much room the three of us take and how much more room we have in our mid-sized SUV. Unfortunately, we are not small people, and even Luke's little knees were so close to the back of my seat. And, as much as I don't want to share a major shortcoming of mine, the entertainment system in the MDX really is a major source of my sanity, especially on rides longer than 15 minutes. (I have a philosophy about the timing of seatbelts and carseats being absolutely mandatory and the subsequent invention of the DVD player in cars, but that is another post altogether.) Anyway, the drive home was one of the longest in history. The boys were so excited to be in the "shark car" as they have so affectionately named it, they couldn't settle down. I learned a lesson about how well sound travels in a smaller space. For forty-five minutes that felt more like four or five hours, (we got stuck on 90th in traffic) it was non-stop laughing, screaming, joking, knock-knocking, happy sounds, stressed out sounds when big brother took something from little brother, etc... you get the idea.

As I started to merge toward our exit, I realized I'd forgotten about the Wal-Mart trip on today's agenda and we were completely out of milk. So I stayed on the freeway for two more exits and we made our way to the dreaded, yet beloved place.

I, like many moms I associate with, have a love-hate relationship with Wal-Mart. I love it because the prices are consistently lower than everywhere else, unless you're buying bulk and Costco is my best friend in that case. But I hate it because it's simply never a pleasant shopping experience, with or without kids. Jon and I joke that it's a bad place for our marriage, especially on Saturdays. If I send him out for something at night, he finds any reason to not go there. Albertson's is a whole .2 miles closer to our house and gas is pricey. I've also come to find that anything can happen at Wal-mart and when someone says, "You'll never believe what I saw at the store today," they're going to follow it up with a Wal-mart story.

It started off ok, other than the safety strap on the cart being broken. No biggie. Then Luke got lost. It was probably really two minutes, but felt a lot longer. I did find him in the video game section, after weaving the cart through the packed isles, almost running over unsupervised rugrats on bikes and scooters, not being able to walk more than a foot away from a restless Harry unbuckled in the broken cart. Luke was so non-chalant with his response to his panicked mother, "Mom I was just playing this super cool game. Let me tell you about it." We had a little talk about stranger danger and staying close to Mom at the store and stuff. Somehow that fueled my usually laid-back little guy. He was running the isles - one of my top ten reasons for hating Wal-mart, he was grabbing everything he wanted and throwing it in the cart - not ok. And was overly helpful at the checkout, dropping things and getting in everyone's way - more of my top ten. His intentions to help were good, I think. We did eventually make it out to the car.

By this point I was feeling a little frazzled - more than the normal trip to the store and I was ready to get home. So we started home and Luke was determined to be good for the rest of the outing since I threatened to not play Super Mario with him tonight. With peace finally in the car, I thought it would be a good time to talk to him about the plans for the weekend. We are dropping off the Pilot because our lease is over and the boys are staying with my folks Friday night. Luke started asking questions about the car, and actually got a little tearful. We have had many fun memories and trips in that great vehicle. We then had to have another little talk about how cars are things and the memories we have stay with us but things like cars come and go. I'm sure there will soon be a goodbye Honda Pilot post in the next few days. You'd think after 17 cars in seven years of marriage, we'd have this down to a science. We weren't expecting our kids to grow emotionally attached to the cars.

We made it home and the boys have returned to their normal angelic state (hee hee). I am getting there, how many moms really feel sane anyway? Especially after a trip to Wal-mart.