Shopping. It’s a bit of a dirty word around here. For one, there are few places in which to do the afore-said activity within the confines of our little burg. This is why we love our good friend “the Internet”. For another, shopping requires funding (did I mention my husband is a school teacher?) Lastly, until just a few months or so ago, shopping meant Pushing a Cart Whilst Being Tortured By Children.

For example, the Middle Child who, as a toddler, was so eager to keep the peace that she rarely disobeyed, managed to disappear at the department store. I only turned my back for a minute, yet when I was done perusing yet another adorable household knick-knack, she was gone. Being that I was at the back of the store, I assumed she was still in the general area and widened my search. A store employee got wind of my distress and volunteered to do an alert for her over the speaker system. Nothing. One should think that an ordinarily obedient child, and a hater of fusses, at that, would be only too eager to be found, or would, at the very least, whimper, when her name was called. Still, nothing.

We finally found her at the front of the store, hiding in one of those circular clothing racks. Once I got over wondering what every person in the store must be thinking of me as a mother, the kind whose child is too afraid to be found at the department store, I rushed her outside and to the car.

“What happened?” I asked in my very casual, conversational way designed to fool toddlers into thinking they have done no wrong, making lying wholly unnecessary. “Why did you hide in that there fun-looking clothes rack?”

Turns out there was a lady with long dark hair like mine whom the Middle Child followed straight up the aisle from the back of the store to the front, thinking she was mommy. When she realized her mistake (the baby in the cart should have been her first clue since the Little Guy didn’t come around for another four years) she was so devastatingly humiliated that she hid. (Now that I know the Middle Child better, this makes perfect sense.)

Of course, the Big Guy (whilst little) is not to be outdone. He has his own hiding story, when, just for fun, he opened a cabinet door and hung out until we managed to open just the right door to find him. This might have been all fun and games for the Big Guy Whilst Little (whose response every time we went into a store and admonished him to stay close was “I can take care of myself! I’m an adult!” The sad part was, he truly believed this) but for us it was a big job since we were in a furniture store and there were many (many, many, many) doors to be opened and cavities to be explored.

Still, this was not the pinnacle of his store shopping torture. The truth is, the pinnacle is truly his collective works, more of those knuckle-dragging events mentioned in my last post (if you haven’t read it, go do that now, I’ll wait), added line upon line, layer upon layer, until the thought of going out and shopping with him induced a very specific form of hysteria most commonly experienced by those waiting to enter the Tower of London (they say Queen Elizabeth when led there, pre-Queen days, sat down on the steps and refused to enter—and she was brave).

Examples abound but two of my favorites are the time he had to use the bathroom at Home Depot (Home Depot, for pity sakes, where food isn’t even served!) and an employee felt compelled to make an announcement over the intercom that someone’s child was in the men’s room and sounded like he needed some assistance (if you don’t know why that one is funny, read my last post already), and the other was when he had to use the restroom at the mall whereupon he threw his shirt on the floor (he had to entirely disrobe even to pee until he was a certain age, somewhere around 17, as I recollect) into a puddle which was not water (because, duh, Men’s Room!) so my husband tossed it n the trash forcing the Big Guy Whilst Little and I to ride up and down the elevator to hide his semi-nakedness (which was pretty weak because it was a glass elevator so all we accomplished, besides containing him in one location, was to display his semi-nakedness on every level of the mall) while The Spouse bought him, not one, but two shirts at The Gap, which, you can bet your buttons was not the brand of the cheapie shirt he threw into the potty-puddle.

You can call the Big Guy many things but try as we might, we just can’t call him stupid. Now, go and shop amongst yourselves.