A Christmas Shopping Surprise

Today, after we had our portraits taken with Santa at the mall, Bregon and I headed down to the opposite end to get Icee's.

I had promised him one if he would help me wrangle the babies for an impromptu Christmas portrait.

We had all three babies calmed down from the excitement of seeing Santa (most had cried.)

They were happily "Reading" their little Santa coloring books. So we decided, upon a whim, to turn off into the toy store.

I should have known better. After all, I know that this one is closing down soon and coincidentally is having a huge sale.

But this store literally looked wiped out. It was as if a tornado had gone through it or worse. There were blank shelves in front and merchandise strewn all over the floor.

It wasn't terribly crowded, so Bregon and I went ahead and decided to turn in, limo-sized stroller and all, and see if we could find any last minute bargains.

We somehow managed to find a path that we, stroller included, would fit through without any problems.

I started to navigate into the store. Well, no sooner had we made it to the first set of end caps, was this employee loudly telling us to," WATCH WHERE WE ARE GOING'" and that I "Really did not need to be in here with all of those kids like that."

I could not believe my ears. You have to keep in mind that, at this point, I had four very placid and seemingly innocent children here, and this woman was trying to talk to us from across the store!

I had Bregon, my 13 year old, who was only helping me navigate our limo and was also on Santa book falling watch.

And then there were my three little people, who were being surprisingly quiet and chewing on their little books.

Well, save for Kai, who was busy trying to read his book upside down, page turning included.

This woman actually had her panties in a wad over us daring to come into the toy store with my very contained and extremely well-restrained, QUIET children in tow.

You would have thought from the way she was acting, that I was allowing them all to run rampant and free, climbing all over everything and tearing up whatever lay in their paths instead of sitting quietly in their stroller.

But, this woman apparently had been having a very bad day, because she did NOT want us , or my little savages, shopping in her store.

Before I could even figure out how to get the stroller turned around, she had started turning beet red and was at a sputtering point.

All I could do was look at her and smile, and say, "Merry Christmas" in the most cheerful voice that I could muster.

I might as well have said a string of expletives for what it was worth. It seemed to only make her even madder.

Ah well, at least we were a nice diversion for someone else's little kids who had taken the opportunity to get all of the shiny whirly gig looking things out of the display box and had commenced to twirling them about madly in the aisles at this point.

I don't know what else the woman said, but I could hear her going on and on as we rolled our way through the mess of merchandise, back out into the mall.

It's a good thing that I didn't really need to shop for any toys this afternoon (or anything else for that matter because by this point, my babies were frightened and crying.)

Then again, even if I had, I don't think that I would have purchased them from this lady.

I suppose if it were a necessity, Santa might take up our plight for us and take care of anything that I may have forgotten in my shock!