Sometimes we do ridiculous things. Things that we know go against everything that is right. For instance, we made a spontaneous move this weekend. We spent two hours at a parade on Saturday morning and left early so we could go home and eat lunch. While eating lunch, we decided to spend the day furniture shopping. We knew we’d be pushing Maximus to his two-year old limits, but we figured we could get a couple of car naps out of him. We piled into the car right as nap time was starting. He fell asleep rather quickly and got a good 45 minute nap in.
Blurry-eyed and barely awake, we put him in a stroller and headed into a furniture store. Our mission: living room furniture. He lasted about 20 minutes in the stroller before he woke up and was ready to get out. His first mission: push the stroller around the store. WITHOUT THE HELP OF MOMMY! I’m saying that dramatically because he screamed every time I touched the handles to steer him away from an end table. Awesome. We were in that store for 1.5 hours.
Here’s what we experienced while in there:
- Toddler pushing an umbrella stroller.
- Toddler trying to poop {that’s a little awkward when you have a sales person working with you}.
- Toddler trying to open all drawers on any table he walked past.
- Toddler trying to pull fabric off the hangers, because hangers are for clothes.
- Toddler unbuttoning his shirt and showing off his belly.
- Toddler barely keeping his shirt on and repeatedly trying to take it all the way off.
- Toddler unbuttoning his shirt again.
- While standing on a couch with his shirt hanging open, yelling “HI DADDY! HI DADDY!” as Bryan walked through the store.
If you spread that out throughout 1.5 hours, it’s not so bad. But there were a lot of overwhelming moments. Some of these things happened right after another and sometimes he was calm between “events.” We both sighed a huge sigh as we exited that store. Partly because we weren’t satisfied with the wasted time and partly because we made it out without the “you break it, you buy it.”
Because we like to punish ourselves, we decided to drive another hour to a different furniture store. We were wrong in our assumption that he would take another nap. Instead he basically went crazy. He was yelling gibberish, freaking out every time we saw a semi, and demanding snacks. But I got to rest my feet for an hour so it rejuvenated me.
For our next parenting move, I made the executive decision to grab one of the in-store race car carts instead of taking in our stroller. This worked well for a long time. We made a big pass through the store and narrowed down to our top three sets. It wasn’t until we started talking with sales people that he got tired of sitting in the double race car. He only had one mishap in this store and it involved him trying to climb into a container that held fabrics. The container was empty and on wheels. He bailed out and shifted his weight when he realized it was falling. Crisis averted! We took that as a sign that it was time to leave and headed for the free cookie before leaving. It was then that we realized we’d been there over 2 hours.
Even though we didn’t have the energy, we stopped at a fast food place and grabbed a quick supper. We got in the car shortly after 7 and within 20 minutes Maximus was fast asleep. He didn’t wake up when Bryan pulled him out of the car, changed his clothes, or put him to bed. Then, because he wanted to be nice to his parents who didn’t get a lot of sleep {yah, pregnancy!}, he slept until almost 8. Of course, when he woke up he was nice and refreshed and ready for the day! Oh to be a toddler…
Oh yah, we didn’t buy anything at the second store either. That’s really a moral breaker when you spend seven hours looking at furniture and you don’t find what you’re looking for. WE HAVE TO DO IT AGAIN!?
