Wednesday, May 19, 2010

The shopping trip

As if I don't have enough to annoy me on a regular basis, I added to the whole stress of life by going birthday shopping for Owen WITH John and Owen and, thank God, Olivia. In case you don't know, it takes AT LEAST 5 women to offset taking two guys shopping. Somehow Olivia and I managed it with just 2 against 2. Neither male was killed during the trip.

We started at Academy Sports looking for shorts, shirts, and shoes for the boy. Olivia and I searched for decent clothing while John made it his task in life to retrieve THE ugliest crap he could find in the store. This has been his "MO" on every shopping trip we've ever made together in the last 26 years. I believe it's his way of punishing me for making him go in the first place. He would walk 8 miles around the store to find a drinking flask belt buckle (I'm not kidding) just to put it in my face so I would have to say, "NO!" He also found and did make Owen try on the brightest and shiniest gold shorts they had in the store. Shocker, Owen refused them. And as Owen came back and forth from the dressing room to get Olivia's and my approval, some boneheads took his dressing room. So as I stood outside his first dressing room fuming a little while Owen's "real" clothes were being held hostage, I had to ask myself, "Why do I do this to myself?" Finally, to end the drama and reclaim my son's clothes so he wouldn't have to go home naked, I had to knock on the door......KNOWING that the woman would say, "Someone's in here." Yeah!? NO DUH! "My son's clothes are in there!" She looked a little scared of me when she opened the door. I was really OK with her assessment of me.

After the clothes shopping was complete, we headed to the shoes to find one pair of "dress" flip flops. But now that I've said that, is there really such a thing as dress flip flops? And guess what? THE first pair he saw, he tried on, declared them a winner and walked away. Boys. That's unheard of in the female world.

The final stop was looking for a baseball bat. Just hit me in the head with a hammer please. The only thing worse than that might be shopping for a gun.

The final stop for the night was Old Navy where more shorts and some shirts had to be tried on......and guess what? Someone took Owen's dressing room again! In all my years of shopping, I've never had my dressing room taken but shop with 2 guys in one night and it happens twice. I told them both, "Yal are amateurs." This happened of course all the while John was searching for more ugly crap and bringing it to me. And as I was explaining this phenomenon to Olivia she said, "It's like he's a dog."

And with the few things we purchased for him tonight, I'm completely certain Owen thinks he has enough clothes for at least the next 6 months. It's just unbelievable to me that we live with males and we let them sleep inside.

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