Forget Disneyland; Let's Go Shopping

Once a week Ben and I have a date night while Matthew has some alone time. I try to make it a special time instead of just running errands. Sometimes I'm a big faker and I run errands and call it special so Ben will think it is. Like how I tell him applesauce is dessert.

For the last two date nights we went to the park and then the beach. This week I needed to buy some warmer clothes for Ben because by the time I got home from buying him clothes the last time he'd already outgrown them. This is because children grow at an exponential rate that, I assume, it God's way of making sure I don't get too attached to money. We received a generous Old Navy gift card for Ben's birthday from his Grammie that I have been slowly picking away at whenever there's a sale and I find coupons. Well, there happens to be a sale on pants and long-sleeved shirts right now, so I wanted to hit it. Now, we have an Old Navy less than five minutes away. But remember Target? The child needs to run, or else. Also, remember how I like to lie to him and make errands special? Going down the street to the place we are always at mooching free air conditioning while the employees eye us with distrust (are they here again? this is their third time this week.) is not necessarily special. So I decided to take B down to the Old Navy at the Irvine Spectrum, a big outdoor mall that also happens to have a big fountain that kids can play in. It's also almost ten miles away. This is a clear violation of my Orange County Driving Law: never be in the car for more than ten minutes. When I was pregnant and then when Ben was a newborn I would buy something online rather than drive the 10-15 minutes to Babies 'r Us. So my decision to go to Irvine qualified me, I believe, for Mother of the Year.

We sat on the parking lot freeway for over a half an hour. That gave me less than an hour to run my errands spend special time with my son. Totally worth it.

I actually remembered to bring a towel and a change of clothes so he could actually play in the fountain instead of watch the other kids play and squirm out of his stroller in envy. He wandered in the water and, when another boy came by, played with a new friend.


After it started getting cooler and I needed to actually get the shopping done, Ben played his new I'm Going to Let Everyone in a Five Mile Radius Know How I Feel about Leaving game.


But since I'm mean, I cruelly tore him away from the fountain, wrapped him in his towel, and left. Then I took him to the bathroom to change his clothes, where he exercised his new-found skill of making echoes.

All dry and happy, we headed to Old Navy. I picked out a few items and graciously (Mother of the Year, remember?) took him out of his stroller and let him run amok around Old Navy. They're remodeling, so there were random walls up everywhere and we were basically alone in the back corner of the store in the kid's section. Ben ran around, kicked and threw soccer balls, buried his face in clothes, terrorized the neatly folded shirts, hugged the mannequins, tried to put on the doggie Halloween tutu costume (????), buried himself in the dog pillows, followed a lady who had french fries, played hide and seek behind the displays, and generally wreaked havoc on the store. And before you take away my Mother of the Year award, you should know that no one else was around and I totally followed the tornado around and cleaned up the wreckage in his wake.