New Glasses Anyone?

Hindsight is twenty-twenty, I'm sure glad that foresight isn't.

When I was sixteen years old, I had a lot of ideas about what my life would hold. Some of my hopes and dreams involved very fancy dinner parties that would require me to wear fabulous gowns everynight. Fast forward to a few days ago.....

How could I have known that on that day I would be in a bathroom stall in a women's restroom of a local pizza joint? How could I have known that I would be unsuccessfully wrangling a very wiggly eighteen month old while trying to assist a partially potty trained three year old with his accident. And with out going into too much detail about the details, I was trying to prevent his accident from dropping out of the pant leg of his pants and onto the floor. I was also sending up prayers that my five year old would still be playing arcade games when I came out of the bathroom and that he had not been abducted by a psycho.

Fast forward to later that afternoon. Now I am dragging my three littles through a Super-Store trying to stock back up on diapers, groceries, and various essential paper products. It was announced that a bathroom break was needed, so we abandoned our half full cart and headed once again for the bacteria cesspool, I mean public restroom. Before I could stop him, partially potty trained child was attempting the ever advanced "standing to urine" position. It didn't end well. Again, I was tying to keep little miss eighteen month old and her grasping hands from touching anything, while wiping up the spray that was now on the walls, toilet, and floor.

The third detail in this adventure was the fact that it was a very cold day and my children were all wearing boots. Well, at least they were when we went into the store. At some point, (before the second bathroom event) while riding in the semi truck version of a shopping cart, (you know, the one with the molded seats that face each other but make for more trouble than they are worth and the seatbelt straps are always broken and even if they aren't, they never prevent the children from escaping the confines of the cart) one small child decided that he didn't need his boots any more. Off they came and a very gracious employee chased me down and returned them to me. I could see that the boots weren't going to stay on those little tootsies and by now the child had decided that socks were optional also. I proudly pushed my cart full of groceries, diapers, paper products, a non-abducted, still here, five year old, and a barefoot three year old. Still wrangling the baby.

You know, it's probably a really good thing that my sixteen year old self couldn't see this coming. She would have probably mourned the loss of her dinner parties and dresses and maybe even ran screaming from the room. But this twenty nine year old version of myself isn't mourning anything. As much as I dislike shopping with barefoot partially potty trained squirmy video gamers, I am eating up every minute of it. Because know what? I have no idea what is coming next, but it can't get much better than this.