Target

What do you when you are already out with your three kids and have an hour to kill before you need to be somewhere? Well you don't go home, because the effort of removing them from the house again after they have settled back in is not worth it. If you're like me you head to Target. Here's the problem, it's a Saturday and not just any Saturday. The last one before Christmas. A smart person would head home and deal with the dread of dragging a child out by hair, arm, ear whatever you had to grab. But being me, we hit Target.

Parking lot was full, should of just heading home. Instead I park, wake up two of my kids (did I forget two were sleeping), get everyone out and carry two in while the third holds my hand. We find a cart but need to head the bathroom. Thank goodness for the family bathroom. I finagle the cart into the bathroom, yield the throne to the oldest, despite the desire to body check him into the wall while screaming "me first". After my turn the baby needs a diaper change, we wash hands and then go searching for the cart with "the black bars". We find the new cart and get everyone seated. We're on our way.

Now, I often hear, I don't look old enough to have one child so add in the fact I have three, I often get looks. Huge carts often bring on more looks. I check the clock, we have 45 minutes. We need two sections of the store. I know pretty much where the stuff we need is at. We head to the toy section. Yes, with three kids and yes some of what we bought was for Christmas for them. After some looking, we get a few items and move on to the stocking stuffer area, we need a few small things for therapist. This is where things get messy, we have been in the store for 35 minutes, we have ten minutes to grab everything and head up front to check out. I find what we need, walk away, I look down and we are missing a shoe! When and where did that happen? So I go back through aisle by aisle, everywhere we were in the store. Weaving in and out of the crowd of people. In a last ditch effort we head back to the stocking stuffer area and there sitting on a shelf was the shoe. I grab it and dash towards the last item I needed to grab. I quickly get it off the rack (so not like me) and dash toward the front.

First line we get into, I unload when all of the sudden the cashier has an issue and is calling over the front end person. I throw everything into the cart and move on, I had less then ten minutes at this point to get everything paid for and car loaded before I needed to be on the road to our next stop. Our little girl is barefoot now and scream that she wants out of the cart. We are at the new cashier, one person in front of us. The cashier is fast, she's all rung out and paying and then the customer says "I have another gift card in the car, I'll just go grab it." Yeah ticked does not describe how beyond mad I was. Having already changes lanes, I wasn't willing to risk getting stuck behind some one again. So here I was stuck waiting for this woman to come back, praying she runs. She gets back, says sorry and I give her a half smile and start chucking tissues and candy on the belt too. We ring out, get to the car, get everyone in, clean up the girl, and I eat my candy bar. Thank you Snickers for keeping me sane in this holiday season.

Oh and we were on time to our next stop. YAY me!