Shopping Spree

You know those times you go to Wal-Mart and spend a million dollars and then get home and realize you might be able to make one meal but you have enough Kool-aid and Cheezits to last a year or two? Macauley and I made one of those trips yesterday. Granted we had to buy a birthday gift and snacks to sustain his daylong grazing now that we're both home from school for the summer, but we also left with a number of non-essentials, including a new bug-shaped watering can, a SpongeBob movie, SpongeBob flip-flops (I am generally opposed to character clothing/shoes but he looked so cute in them I relented temporarily), books, headbands, scrapbooking letters, mascara, lipgloss and 24 miscellaneous flavored waters. When I handed Macauley the lipgloss to put in the cart, he said, "Oooh, Mom. This color is beautiful! Men are going to be knocking down our door!" No idea where he got that, but he has learned that telling me I'm pretty and skinny and "sexy" will get him everywhere with me, including into a pair of gaudy bright yellow SpongeBob flip-flops! Before we left for the store, Macauley crafted a shopping list for us (a fairly tedious process that involved me spelling out each word while trying to shop on ebay and figure out my new blog). He embellished it with some tape and one of my scrapbooking leaf design punches. The climax of the whole excursion, however, was when I absentmindedly wandered into the men's bathroom by mistake. We used to always shop at the Wal-Mart on South Campbell because it is close to KHS, and there the women's restroom is on the right. The Independence Wal-Mart, where we shopped yesterday, has it placed on the left. Sadly, I have done this before there, but yesterday I was all the way in, door closed behind me, when I looked up and saw at least six men gawking back at me. Fortunately in my embarrassment my eyes went crossed so the whole scene was blurry and I have no lingering specifics, but I backpeddled out of there, face red, Macauley chuckling. We hid in the women's until we thought the coast was clear then giggled for at least another few minutes as we continued to load up our cart with junk we didn't need. We took forever to check out, partly because we had so much stuff, but also because I brought my own reusable shopping bags and the cashier had to disable the uberefficient bag carousel and place my items more tediously. Despite the time (and inconvenience to all the huffy people in line behind me), I am hellbent on using few to no plastic bags in my life, knowing they each take several hundred years to decompose--I'm not hyperenvironmental but I figure every little bit helps, at least that's what I think Oprah said. I'm sure even shopping at Wal-Mart is one of the worst, most politically incorrect things I can do...Oh well. Baby steps.

We had a good day and finished off the evening by curling up in my favorite big chair downstairs with Daddy to watch The Wizard of Oz, one of my favorite movies since I was young. I bet several of us can remember how, when we were growing up, the movie was played on TV once or twice a year and it was an event! So I spent a majority of the movie watching Macauley's face and reactions rather than the screen. He loves "disaster" so the tornado was a highlight for him, and he had lots of questions about how witches can be both good and bad and if the lion was really just a man dressed up in a lion costume. I thought he would fall asleep halfway through because we started it late, but he was a trooper. He said he liked it. I am such a sap because when Dorothy was singing the classic "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" I semi-teared up at the thought of life coming full circle in a way, how I couldn't have known when I was a little girl lying on my tummy in front of our big console RCA TV (or a similar model at my Nanny and Papaw's house) watching Dorothy and company how it would really feel to someday be cuddled up with my own child seeing the whole thing in a new way. Kind of cheesy, I know. Probably just a Mom thing. But those words Dorothy uses to make it back to Kansas resonate in so many ways for me, and especially in how much I am enjoying being at my house with my little boy and my stuff and my creative projects and not at work with other people's kids and other people's agendas. There really is no place like home. Click click.