Monday, May 03, 2010

Shopping Spree


With Amy in the home stretch studying for her final final exam of her educational life, I decided to take the kids shopping. In manageable doses, and with strategic infusions of snacks, this can be highly effective: I get stuff done, and they get to go someplace new and interesting.

Our morning began at Ikea, where I lugged two mattresses and a comforter cover into the returns department, took a number, and waited about 15 minutes to process the return; meanwhile, Aaron and Jada took turns running, circling, walking, and crawling nearby. From there, we went straight to the section of the store where you pull items, since I had looked up where the two things I wanted to buy were. Within minutes, we were done and I had thrown the items and the kids back in the car.

We drove through the parking lot to the Lowes, where I found a behemoth dolly with wheels to drag the kids around in. They fancied this unorthodox way of travel, enjoying having to stand and hold on to the metal bars in order to keep from falling off. They like looking at the water fountains, so we made a pit stop there so they could make a closer inspection. Then we made our way to the back of the garden center and I plopped six big bags of mulch onto the dolly, wrangled it over to the outdoor cashier, paid, wheeled everyone and everything to the car, and threw the bags into our tiny little trunk.

All shopping items accounted for, we walked through the parking lot back to Ikea to enjoy a cheap lunch and a nice view of the riverfront and of the USS United States, parked at a nearby pier. Aaron didn't want meatballs and then ended up eating all of his plus some of Jada's, but otherwise lunchtime went off without a hitch. Then, it was time to head home, unload all of these new items into our house and onto our porch, and shuttle the kids off to "room time." Not too bad for a Saturday morning.

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