Welfareloser's Blog

day 3 of first grade, and i got the first call from his teacher. i already told nodamnsense it’d be in the first two weeks…

it was for talking. not bad, really, given some of the creative things he decided to do in kindergarten. he talks to other kids instead of doing his work. when the teacher is talking, he’s blurting things out. i probably should have just told his teacher that i’ve been fighting his pathological need to talk at all times, no matter what, since he was 9 months old, with little noticeable effect. because seriously, if you tell a teacher you’ve pretty much given up on your boy ever shutting the heck up, she’s going to think you’re indulgent, uncaring, or lazy. she’s just going to ahve to figure this one out for herself… a gun to his head will not shut him up. haven’t tried it, but i’d bet dollars to donuts on it. you can punish the crap out of him, and no, the punishments aren’t weak. they suck. he’s feelin it. he knows it sucks, and he understands what he needs to do to stop the punishments. and he can’t… shut… up. ever.

he narrates. he lets you know what everyone around him is doing, down to the smallest detail. he lets you and every stranger within earshot know what random cool ideas have flitted through is mind recently. if he runs out of narration and random thoughts, he’ll either make up a video game level for you to play through with him or dig up some old story to tell (like the story of king herod bashing in the babies heads that he learned when he was three from some preschool teachers with maybe a bit of myopia when it comes to the bible… or the time he went to the beach for a week… or anything else he thinks you’ll find interesting.) the point is, he’ll do whatever it takes to avoid silence. it’s like “speed,” and the bus is his mouth. you will cease to exist if you allow the bus to stop!!!!

anyway. here’s the boy chillin in his office as his daddy chills in his office (and, please note who keeps his office cleaner) on the other side of the wall:

so i had a $5 best buy gift certificate to burn, and went digging through the bargain dvds. wound up choosing “Spiderman: The Venom Saga,” since the boys are recently totally into spiderman, especially since we went to the costume-and-magic shop the other day to look for rubber claws and came home with three rubber spiderman masks, as well:

that’s spazmonkey. he currently refuses to answer to his actual name, and refers to himself as “spiderman.” in fact, when one of his brothers mentions spiderman, spazmonkey comes running in with, “yeth? i here.”

now, note the nefariously curled fingers on the boy. this indicates that he is currently “evil spiderman.” see, in “the venom saga,” spiderman gets accosted by some alien ooze that turns him evil. spazmonkey is fascinated by evil (favorite star wars characters? boba fett and darth vader. favorite spongebob character? the dirty bubble. etc.), even moreso now that he realizes that every good entity may also have an evil counterpart. he makes his care bear fruit snacks “evil care bears” by squishing their faces into frowns. he turns his stick figures evil by scribbling in angry eyebrows and jagged mouth-lines. yesterday, while squishing out ice cubes from his play-doh refrigerator, he asked me for an evil ice cube. i made the edges jaggedy. seemed to satisfy. as nodamnsense says… we probably ought to make sure that any educational savings account we have for spazmonkey has a loophole that allows us to spend the money on legal fees.

so i took the heathens to the mall today. not my favorite thing to do, especially over the summer when it’s PACKED with kids, but i had some gift certificates that needed spending (and i must add that, with its new passionfruit shimmer lotion, bath & body works has totally redeemed itself from the salt-scrub butt-burning incident of last winter. ow.)

while running around the foam structures of the indoor playground, dramaqueen found himself on a collision course with another three-year-old, a little blonde girl. as they approached each other, i figured they’d each have one of three reactions: 1) stop running, 2) run in a different direction, or 3) be unable to process the fact that something bad was about to happen and be totally surprised when they land on their butts with knots on their heads.

dramaqueen actually came up with a further option: 4) squeeze his eyes tightly shut, knowing that this was about to hurt, but also put his head down and run faster.

okay, the kid wasn’t doing it to be a dick – he was obviously cringing in anticipation of the collision. it was sort of an incomplete processing of the situation and options available: he knew what was coming, he knew it was going to hurt, he just couldn’t figure out how to avoid it on time. however, in addition to that, some caveman instinct insisted that he ought to speed up and charge harder. kind of reminds me of the couple of times that little turd has been cornered by a bigger, angrier kid… he never hits. he’s the sweetest little boy ever. so you’d think if he ever saw an ass-beating coming, he’d just close his eyes and take it and cry. but actually, the couple of times he’s been cornered, some primal snake-brain takes over, and suddenly he lunges for either the throat or the balls. and the lesson of the day: beware the quiet ones.

anyway. the little girl had more sense than dramaqueen, and neatly sidestepped, leaving dramaqueen to crash head-on into a big foam teddy bear and come up, relieved grinning, yelling “hi, girl!” then they played hopscotch.

spazmonkey got really pissed at some huge kid (who, of course, had no parent in sight) who decided to try to take his toy robot. now, spazmonkey has learned from his big brother that, when confronted by a larger child, your best option is to act crazy. so spazmonkey threw himself on his back and howled and snorted until the bigger kid decided it wasn’t worth it to try to make it past the flailing legs to get to the robot. so spazmonkey quit the tantrum routine and lay there for a bit, studying the way the dust motes danced in the sunlight that sliced through the skylight. suddenly, a grade school girl in a shamefully short skirt and tiny panties (okay… i’d sneer at a sorority girl dressed like that. dammit, i’m not a prude. i’m all for dressing like a hoochie, and i think little girls ought to wear whatever makes em feel pretty. but damn. the show-all panties killed me. the mother of this girl should have been locked up.) walked right over spazmonkey’s head. yep… it was the boy’s first real upskirt, and i’ll be noting it in his baby book, thank you. his eyes got real big… his mouth opened… i cringed in anticipation of the forth coming commentary… which was thankfully limited to, “wow. no penis.”

then he went to play hopscotch.

like i said: the account of my five-day vacation will be presented as a list of sub-lists, cleverly designed to distract you from the fact that i’m too lazy to string this into a coherent narrative.

ROADS

1. MISSOURI worst roads in the midwest, a fact i had conveniently forgotten until i spent a few hours on them between st. louis and kansas city. i mean, damn. I-70 in missouri is really a stunning collection of potholes loosely connected by the occasional patch of asphalt. missouri roads also have the highest density of dead skunks of the four states sampled (kansas came in second, colorado third, and illinois a distant fourth. boring fact? sure! but hey, you never know when that question will pop up in trivial pursuit!)

2. KANSAS nicest roads in the midwest, hands down. i don’t think i hit a single bump or dip the entire freakin way… and it was a long way. you know how i know the wizard of oz is pure fiction? because dorothy ACTUALLY GOT OUT OF KANSAS. see, in reality, nobody gets out of kansas. ever. it’s the state that won’t die, no matter how early you start and how fast you drive. it goes on… and on…

now, nodamnsense was blown away by what a shitty drive kansas was, what with the boring landscape and never-ending monotony. (it probably didn’t help one bit that he was in a massive uhaul on a hot day with no air-conditioning.) i actually enjoyed the drive… it was a beautiful day, you could see forever, the clouds were gorgeous, and i was really impressed with how pretty the numerous fields of sunflowers were. and, bonus! … i found chase’s cherry mash at a gas station, the first time i’d found it on my own. it is by far the best of the hard-to-find mom-n-pop-made candies mentioned in the book candy freak.

here’s a picture i took through the windshield that totally does not do justice to the breathtaking cloud formation i was trying to capture.

3. COLORADO the roads in colorado are pretty good. with fewer skunks! really, the important thing to mention is that the speed limit is 75, which totally rocks.

4. DENVER (if you are bothered by the fact that the first three items on this list are states, and the fourth a city, go fuck yourself, and get some meds for the OCD on the way.) i quickly remembered this from my last trip to denver six years ago (“quickly” actually being shorthand for “not quickly enough, since i had already left the house without adequate directions”): none of the streets in denver are two way, nor are they anywhere close to straight. if you don’t know where you’re going and how to get there, you’re fucked. in denver, the answer to the question “how do you get there from here?” is pretty much maniacal laughter.

nodamnsense had a run of short work days while i was there (yay!) but on the one day he was working late, i ventured into downtown denver to find some brewpubs (there are FOUR in denver, which is as good a reason as any to live there) to buy beer and t-shirts for positiverolemodel. i found flying dog (which yielded a “horn dog barleywine” t-shirt, a four-pack of “gonzo imperial stout,” and a special-release champagne bottle of “wild dog weizenbock”) and breckenridge brewery, which wouldn’t sell me any beer (i really wanted to take home a growler of fresh draught, but struck out) but had a really cool t-shirt for their new summerbright ale, a weizen which is getting stellar reviews across the board.

anyway, i had printed out directions from nodamnsense’s place on the outskirts of denver to all the brewpubs in denver before leaving home, because i have my priorties straight. as is my habit, i didn’t print out reverse directions, because even though my sense of direction is bad enough to have earned me the nickname “magellan,” going back the way you came just isn’t hard.

unless you’re in denver. you can’t go the way you came on a one-way street, and you can’t easily find the corresponding parallel street that goes one way the OTHER way when there’s no such thing as “parallel” because there’s no such thing as “straight.” or “right angle.” oops. now, i’m not completely stupid; in addition to the google map that got me from the apartment to the brewpubs, i also had my rand mcnally road atlas, which had a decent (though not terribly detailed) map of the city, AND i had the foresight to steal nodamnsense’s phone book for the meticulously detailed map in there. funny thing about the denver phone book map that i discovered as soon as i got lost… it doesn’t show the whole city of denver! no shit! it actually only shows the center of the city, and where other phone books would say “map continues at G-12 on page 38,” or the like, the denver map just ended. fuuuuuuuck. so i spent a good half-hour, maybe longer, caroming through the 6-lane roads of denver, flipping through 3 maps, and felt like a freakin genius when i finally rolled into nodamnsense’s parking lot. it was a character-building experience, and i am a better person for it. and by “better person,” i mean “a person who will always print out return directions from now on.”

CITIES IN DIRE NEED OF MY RIDICULE

1. FULTON, MO every city along a major highway is like a whore in a hoochie skirt and halter top trying to catcall johns into pay for her services; replace “whore” with “city,” “hoochie skirt” with “attractions,” and “catcall” with “billboard describing the city’s attractions,” and the simile becomes clear. now, some cities advertise war memorials, presidential monuments or libraries or birthplaces, museums from antique cars to elvis to toys, or even something completely lame like the world’s second-largest ball of rubber bands. hey, whatever gets the truckers to stop for a shower and a slice of pie; it’s all good.

but by far the saddest catcall i ever saw was the billboard for fulton, missouri. the one goddamned claim to fame this sorry little shithole had was that winston churchill had once visited the town. at some point, somebody decided to build a museum about the event, and put up a billboard advertising it. now, to return to my simile, this is like a 73-year-old quadruplegic midget whore using “i only have two std’s; guess what they are and you get a blowjob for half-price!” as her catcall.

2. KANORADO okay, i didn’t actually note which of kansas or colorado actually claims this city, and i don’t care. they should both be ashamed of themselves, goddammit. it’s no more forgivable than illiana or michiana, two very good reasons to be ashamed of the state of indiana.

THINGS THAT FUCKED WITH MY IMPULSE CONTROL

1. SPAREANYTHING though i suppose the correct phonetic rendering of the name would be more like “sparan’thang.” spareanything is a two-inch bluegill that nodamnsense caught and decided to keep in an aquarium in his living room (so he could “study it and learn its ways,” thus making him a ninja of a fly-fisherman.) it got its name by being a shameless beggar for all things food-like, jumping and flipping and damn near turning into a seaworld dolphin anytime anyone walks by. he was named after a homeless dude at our alma mater (who has been here at least the entire 13 years of positiverolemodel’s stay) who hangs out around the bars every night, hitting up drunk college kids with “spare anything?” it’s probably quite lucrative; i know i’ve given him money several times over the years, because, hey, i’m drunk and happy, and he should be too.

anyway. the first time spareanything fucked with my impulse control was when i wondered how big i could get the little fucker if i fed the shit out of him for 5 days while nodamnsense was at work. i’d find it really funny if he had to keep the damn thing in his bathtub because it outgrew the aquarium.

the second was when nodamnsense asked me what kind of pranks i had pulled on his shit while he was out, and i just laughed. i hadn’t actually done anything, but because of our 7-year history of trading spectacular pranks, he thinks i did. (in fact, he emailed positiverolemodel to ask for a hint, and he just told nodamnsense that he wouldn’t find it, but he’d probably smell it in a month or so.) so, while on the phone with positiverolemdel, i decided i probably just ought to take a fat shit in the fishtank. he gave this idea the serious consideration it deserved for a long moment, but ultimately decided that it would likely just end with me, a turd, and a pissed off fish splattered in a large puddle of water and broken glass. my husband is nothing if not wise.

2. THE SPRINKLER SYSTEM so while laying on the futon in the living room, drifting off to sleep to the gentle waterfall sounds of the aquarium and the “yeti crashing through the waterfall to eat your face” sounds of nodamnsense snoring in the next room, i noticed a shiny object up on the wall near the ceiling. it took me a moment to realize that it was a sprinkler. wow. i’ve never been in a residence that had an honest-to-god sprinkler system (meaning, not an improvised one made from a watering can, a precariously perched bucket, or the kitchen sprayer) before.

i mean, for such a ridiculously small output of effort – striking a single match – you get such a spectacularly huge reward – massive rainfall that would wake nodamnsense up screaming! how hard is that to pass up? hard, i tell you! it took me a long time to fall asleep, giggling to myself!

3. MENTOS AND DIET COKE so the denver post ran an entire lengthy article about the mentos-and-diet-coke phenomenon. i had never heard of it before, but apparently, a search for “mentos diet coke” on youtube will yield dozens of videos of variations on the results of mixing the two. the reaction was explained (a couple of mint mentos will cause every single bubble in a bottle of diet coke to forcible EXIT the diet coke all at the same time) along with the variations on the “experiment” that the journalist had either witnessed (fruit mentos don’t work, nor do sugary sodas or non-flavored carbonated water) or tried himself (like holding a huge amount of diet coke in his mouth and popping in a couple of mentos… in describing the results, he used the words “spectacular,” “frightening,” “out my nose,” and “nearly died.” and if you can pass up trying that yourself, you have the impulse control of a fucking rock!)

so, yeah. i had to go to the grocery store on the corner for some food for the return trip and a few things for nodamnsense’s fridge, and a bottle of diet coke and a box of mentos came home with me. i forgot about them until we were headed out for dinner, and i spent the entire time on the drive there, at the restaurant, and on the way back, telling him that i had an “experiment” or “surprise” waiting for him at home that he had to help me with. his pained look every time i laughed was priceless. i believe his exact quote was “anytime the word ‘experiment’ comes out of your mouth, i should just call the fire department immediately.” but i had a trump card: “it’s my birthday. you have to do what i say.”

anyway. not being a dumbass, he had a pretty good idea of where things were headed when i told him to mix two substances in his mouth, and he managed to spit his entirely into the sink. after a stunned silence, he just said “wow.” mine shot out about 6 or 7 feet, which was pretty damned impressive, and i managed to direct the stream well enough that none came out my nose. then we dropped a couple more mentos in the rest of the 20-oz bottle, and watched it shoot up at least a foot. imagine what a 2-liter would do!!!! everybody must try it! give yourself over to the power of the gods of food engineering! experience the majesty of the near-nuclear explosion that, no shit, killed that mikey kid from the life cereal commercials! NOW YOU’RE PLAYING WITH POWER!

4. ALL YOU CAN EAT WOOD-FIRED PIZZA BUFFET plus, i’m pregnant. do i really need to say any more? of all the restaurants we hit, oh sweet monkey christ was that the winner.

5. COLDSTONE CREAMERY CAKE BATTER ICE CREAM

i would eat it with a goat
i would eat it on a boat
i would eat it in the rain
i would eat it on a train
i would eat it here or there
i would eat it anywhere!

okay, i *would* eat it anywhere, except it’s not AVAILABLE just anywhere. the only ones in illinois are in the chicago area, there are none in my frequently-visited hometown in the st louis area, and there are none in the entire state of fucking iowa, where i’m moving next. DAMMIT! and with that, nodamnsense will have to put up with me visiting at least twice a year.

now, the impulse control got fucked with, not only by the sheer volume of ice cream that i was served and hell-bent on eating now matter how much it hurt, but also by the stir-ins. i got my cake batter ice cream, not plain, but as the “candyland” apocalypse. it had chopped up kitkats, snickers and m&ms in it. about halfway through the jesus-christ sized portion they called “medium,” the m&ms were just overkill… mediocre chocolate getting in the way of the sweet, sweet butter-and-vanilla explosion that was the cake batter ice cream.

now, i learned in high school, whilst laying bored on my bed with my trusty marksman slingshot at my side, that m&ms make awesome projectiles. (when my mom repainted after i moved out, she asked me what all the hundreds of red, orange, brown, yellow and blue dings in the ceiling were. i said “i don’t know.” hey, frown if you will, but the woman had it coming; she had just taken down a 3-year accumulation of dragon artwork from dragon magazine and THROWN IT ALL AWAY. something about the rubber cement being the wrong adhesive choice. whatever!) now, since i didn’t have my slingshot with me (note to self: along with the zippo lighter and economy-size KY jelly, the slingshot goes on the list of “things that always get packed for any trip”) and i had a bunch of projectiles swimming in my ice cream as we walked the streets of downtown denver, the only logical thing to do was dig them out with my finger, suck the ice cream off them, and spit them at nodamnsense’s head. i’m not a bad shot, by the way!

now, having spent his first month of residency in the denver general ER, nodamnsense has learned three things (see? a sub-list!):

a) if you hang out on the corner in denver minding your own business long enough, an ass-beating will eventually come along, probably in the form of a cop

b) if the cops don’t beat your ass, one of the many bands of feral ninjas that roam the streets of denver will (this information is from the badly swollen mouth of an addict nodamnsense treated a while back, who couldn’t remember how he got all bitched up, but since he had studied tae kwon do, it “must have been ninjas. several of them.” so take that for what it’s worth… the gospel truth!)

c) ER residents and attendings collectively have an awesome sense of humor

anyway. he was pretty sure that me spitting m&ms at him on the streets of denver would end with his ass in the ER, haven taken an ass-beating from either cops or feral ninjas, and getting laughed at by all of his colleagues for the rest of his life. disappointingly, this didn’t happen.

6. SWALLOW HILL this is some sort of foundation that bought an old church and invited anyone with an instrument to show up and play old-timey music. they have blues jams, bluegrass jams, celtic jams, and more. these people actually let me in the door with a banjo i built myself and ENCOURAGED ME TO PLAY IT. never had one lesson! even more amazingly, nobody told me to stop after they heard the results of my two months of practicing (which pretty much amounted to “chopping a chord, or at least two or three strings of a chord, occasionally even the right chord, more or less in time with the rest of the musicians.”) now, any impulse control i might have had when it comes to knowing my place and shutting the hell up when i don’t know which end is up went totally out the window in such a nice environment. we hit the celtic jam on monday night, the bluegrass jam on tuesday night, nodamnsense burned down the trailer park, and i made some noise, too. and it was good. and jesus wept!

nodamnsense’s sister, smitingthewickedforminimumwage, has an idea about a coffee table book consisting entirely of pictures of fruits and vegetables that have grown in forms suggestive of various part of the human anatomy. she kicked things off with a strawberry worthy of georgia o’keefe:

i finally got to contribute when a tomato, not surprisingly grown in positiverolemodel’s garden, mooned me:

now, smitingthewickedforminimumwage is currently taking suggestions for the name of her phallic fruits photography studio. all comments welcome.

work on the big-ass road-trip post continues (translation: haven’t started it yet.) but i composed it in my head on my way across kansas, using the voice recorder on my cheapo mp3 player to take notes. as soon as i find my mp3 player, i’m set!

so in the meantime, here’s a picture of me and nodamnsense at about 6 AM on the day i left, both of us looking rode hard and put away wet after 4 or 5 days of acting like assholes:

i should be embarrassed by how retarded we look. okay, actually, i’m just slightly embarrassed by how retarded *i* look, since i don’t really give a damn about embarrassing my friends. they generally deserve it. anyway, *you* try taking a picture of yourself and someone a foot taller than you with a camera held at arm’s length while sitting on a very deep futon. i gave up after 3 shots of this nonsense. it’s the camera angle! i swear! i’m actually totally hot in person! and dammit, we’re hardly 30, and don’t look that old in person. it’s just the sleep deprivation. (YOUR sleep deprivation, that is, causing the optical illusion.)

so today, evilgremlin awakened me with “mom? you should just stay away from robots, because you never know when they’ll turn evil.” he went on to explain that it was probably okay if you made the robot from things in your house, but even at that you just couldn’t be too careful. yep. the boy is working on all kinds of high-quality ideas, just in time for first grade.

damn my black heart, i’m actually starting to like walmart. while trolling the clearance toys aisle the other day, i found an accordian just like the one nodamnedsense’s boy wampus has, marked down to $7.50. dramaqueen spent a full half hour squeezing the shit out of it and laughing his butt off.

and i don’t know what spazmonkey was planning here, but it was obviously evil. so i stopped him.

a week in a child-free zone with my best friend totally rocked, but it’s good to be home, too. i’m eating feta cheese and black pepper over tomatoes from the garden (cherokee purple, brandywine red, persimmon orange, and … some kind of yellow… whatever; it’s pretty), i’ve got computer access again, and most importantly, i was awakened this morning by EG saying “hey mom? i need an ice cube and a rubber band.” yep! i’m home. (and by the way, i just said no to EG. i didn’t even bother asking. i can’t imagine an answer that would have led me to say yes.)

so. my next couple of posts will detail my road trip to denver. the posts will be in the form of a list. actually, it’ll be a series of lists. sort of a big list of sub-lists. actually, what it’s really going to be is a whole bunch of completely unrelated sentences and sentence fragments that i’m too lazy to even attempt to string into a coherent narrative. i might fit it all into one post. it might take several. dunno. and you don’t care, either, do you, so long as it’s entertaining, which it will be.

or, more specifically, we blow at walmart. i try to stay the heck out of walmart, partly because walmart is evil, but mostly because walmart scares me. we live on the outskirts of town, right before “town” turns into “cornfields.” they turned one of those cornfields into another walmart. now, the original walmart downtown is trashy. the people who shop there are yucky. THIS walmart is worse. the people who shop there are not the yuckiest people in our twin cities (pop. 100,000), but the yuckiest people from a dozen tiny rural towns within 20 miles (pop.s 400 – 3,000, if you count the cows.) and lemme tell ya… the jazzy scooters have more flesh oozing off them, the grins have more air whistling through them, the mullets are longer, the kids dirtier, the teen moms younger, the grammar poorer, the laughs louder and more gravelly, and overall, everybody is more fragrant.

now, unfortunately, my husband has been working for two months without pay, we have $30 in our checking accout, and most damning of all, i’m lazy and this walmart is 2 minutes from my house instead of 20 like every other freakin store in town. so i went grocery shopping there a while back. it wasn’t the best idea. it smells bad there. smells bad + morning sickness = me puking in the meat aisle. my best friend nodamnsense asked me if the person who came to clean it up was pissed at me for puking, perhaps assuming that i was drunk, and i told him i didn’t tell anyone to come clean it up because, really, it’s walmart, and my puke on the floor was an improvement as far as that hellhole was concerned.

so yesterday, it was way too hot to drive across town, and i’m way too broke and lazy, too! so we went to walmart. i must say, one thing in their favor: they’ve got the best 3-kid carts ever. they make an extendo-limo version that has these cushy plastic thrones that not only do not face the person pushing the cart (and more importantly, that person’s kickable shins,) the cushy seats are offset from each other, at an angle, so the kids are sort of facing each other, but can’t really kick each others’ shins, either. the entire contraption, with 3 kids and $170 worth of food, probably weighed a good 300 lbs (at least,) but i’m not gonna complain.

so first off, i tell the boys it’s time to get in the car. evilgremlin, the only boy with even an occasional hint of sense, puts on his socks and shoes. spazmonkey runs off mumbling “sockth an shooth, sockth an shooth, sockth an shooth.” he comes back wearing his pirate hat, a lightsaber, a t-shirt, and his rubber boots. i ask him where his pants are. “no pantth!” i tell him he needs pants. “no pantth!” so i turn around to deal with dramaqueen first, who is digging through the toy bins under the coffee table looking for his shoes. he is inexplicably butt nekkid. his shoes are, of course, on the mat next to the front door, exactly where they always are.

half an hour later, we’s at the walmarts. i opened a can of pringles for them, and in a fit of “i will eat these before my brothers do” gone horribly wrong, spazmonkey was forced to eject the mushy remains of at least 40 freakin pringles over an impressively large area of floor. (nodamnedsense says that he’ll be surprised if walmart doesn’t have a restraining order against me by the end of the year.) once the entertainment value of eating all the junkfood they can handle had worn off, they contented themselves with pretending to be the walmart PA system, screeching at startled passersby things like “ALL DA CHIKIN NUGGETS IS IN DA AISLE NINETEEEEEEEN!” and “MR. JONES YOUR CAR DA QUESTION IS DA DA DA DA DA DA AISLE FOURTEEEEEEEEN!” and “I WANT ICE CREAM AISLE TWOOOOOOO!” this got us safely to the checkout, where i successfully shut them up with push pops.

now, another thing about walmart: it claims to be a grocery store, but it’s really more of a junkfood emporium. if i had the time and someone was paying me to do it, i’d sit down and calculate the square footage of shelf frontage taken up by junk food vs. that taken up by more healthful food, and compare it to other grocery stores. when i shop at schnucks, i come home with tofu, bakery bread, fresh vegetables and fruits, and the like. when i come back from walmart, i seem to have purchased barbecue vienna sausages, triple-butter microwave popcorn, and cheez whiz. where schnucks would have yielded frozen stir-fry dishes, maybe something as bad for me as a hot pocket, walmart gave me “HUNGRY MAN CLASSIC FRIED CHICKEN WITH POTATOES AND A BROWNIE ONE FULL POUND OF FOOD!!!!” i think that weight i’ve been fighting like hell to gain for this pregnancy… may be on its way soon.