*Sigh*

Last night my mom called and told me she was buying me and Annalise a ticket to New Jersey. For Friday. This Friday! To visit my grandma, who has never met my Squiggly Bug. It will be great to see my mom and grandma. The 5 1/2 hours on a plane to get there will be slightly less than great. Slightly more similar to a horrendous hole in the head. Actually, if I could just plug up my head holes (otherwise known as ear drums) we might do a lot better. But I will not dwell on it. To New Jersey we go!

To get ready for the trip, I MUST have some new clothes. I currently live in maternity jeans and blobby sweatshirts every day, not quite able to fit into my pre-pregnancy clothes, and not quite willing to buy new bigger ones. But I can no longer stand it and if I am visiting relatives, looking at least relatively presentable is high on my list of WannaDoIts. So today my extremely age-advanced seven-month-old and I headed off to the store with the slight hope that she might let me try things on. Though she never has before. She won't sit in a stroller and a shopping cart seat is only marginally (and short-terminally) satisfactory. Though her shopping cart seat cover is toile. And cost forty-one dollars.

It started badly.

I got Buggy-Boo all ready to go, freshly woken from a two-hour nap, and nursed to the brim, when I realized Dave had the debit card. The sole family debit card. (The reason we have one sole family debit card is not important at all. Dave, if you are reading this, just skip on down to the next paragraph. For the sake of your blood pressure. Okay, now he's gone. Soooo... it's my fault. Because I lost the other one. Somewhere in the house so I don't want to cancel it. But I can't find it. And it was actually his. Don't get Dave started. Moving on...)

So we had to drive to his work to pick it up. No biggie, really. A nice visit with daddy ensued, all his coworkers got their baby fix, and we all got to hear seventeen thousand times how AMAZING it is that Annalise is his IdenticalTwinMiniMeClone. Only a half hour lost. No problem. Annalise still had a lot of 'happy' left in her HappyTank.

It got worse.

Dave escorted us to the car. 

"Bye!" we said. Then, "Oh wait," we said.

Giant Flat Tire Predicament appeared before our unsuspecting eyes and growled its flat and ugly roar.

We hemmed and hawed for a few minutes before Dave gallantly offered to switch cars with me and get it fixed on his lunch break so that no more 'happy' need drain from the baby's HappyTank before commencement of SuperShop Attempt 2010. 

So I spent ten minutes trying to stuff Annalise and her car seat into the tiny backseat of my two-door Mustang and after all the hard work realized that having her behind the driver's seat meant I could no longer put my seat in its upright position, and I had to be crammed as far forward as possible, necessitating me driving with my knees crushed up under the steering wheel. From the backseat Annalise began crying loudly. 

It turned horrible.

We got to the store and pacified for the moment, Annalise contented herself with trying to reach out and grab every tag hanging off of every clothing item on every rack. I ripped one off for her and gave it to her to suck on while I madly threw anything that looked elephant-sized but halfway-decent into the cart. So happy with her tag, she was very silent and as I rushed into the dressing room I looked down to discover she was very contently chewing on something. The tag in her hand was only half there. "Aahh!" I screamed, grabbing her head and attempting to pry open her mouth. "AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!" she screamed much louder, yanking her head away and mashing her lips together ferociously. As she screamed, I craaaaaammed my finger into her mouth and she bit me as hard as her new teethies could clamp, and I swiped out the offending hunk of cardstock. She threw her head back and howled at the top of her lungs, tears flinging from the sides of her face, body arching and contorting in protest.

"She bit me!" I gasped, staring at my finger. 

"Well... at least... she has teeth?" said a nearby bewildered woman, trying to be positive.

Now she was crying in earnest at the injustice. Moments before I was to begin walking in the door of the dressing room. The one time when I absolutely needed to not be holding her to accomplish my goal. They gave me a number card to hang on the door and as it was large and plastic and she hopefully couldn't find a way to swallow it, I handed it to her and she reacted as though I'd gifted her with a most delicious popsicle. Of course, the cart couldn't fit into any dressing room, so I took her to the very last one at the end of the hall and left the door open with her right in front of it to change for possibly the world to see. She shouted and growled loudly at her toy while I tried on my stuff, including a pair of jeans with a ridiculously large size number that nonetheless was too small. She was fussing angrily by the time I was finished and all I had was one shirt that was decent. So I ran around collecting things from racks that I didn't even try on, threw them in my cart, and figured I would try them on at home. With Annalise flatly refusing any more time in the cart, I hefted her onto my hip and waited in line.

It managed to get worse.

I went to pay. But the credit card was not in my pocket. I'd just gotten it from Dave. It used to be in my pocket. It was no longer in my pocket. Dragging my heavy kid, I retraced my steps all over the store, went back and checked the dressing room, asked all the workers, was denied at every turn, and began fretting mightily over Dave's assured reaction to the news that I'd lost both our credit cards.

With none of the clothes I'd worked so hard to procure, I trudged out to the car with my head down.

It got a tiny bit better.

There was the credit card, having slipped out on my seat.

We drove back to Dave's work to switch back the cars and Annalise cried. The end.

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