5 Kids and a Bag of Swedish Fish

I am not sure what I was thinking exactly on this particular day, but I was feeling the extreme pressure of knowing that school was going to start in a week, Open House was 3 days away, and I had not done any school shopping for my children yet.  Mainly because I had been hesitant about dragging 5 children around to store after store school shopping, but now I was running out of time and it looked like I was not going to get a chance to go solo or even with a smaller cast of characters, so I loaded up my van and all my minions and headed to JC Penny, Target and wherever else we needed to go.

I went to Penny’s first to check out book bags and back packs and lunch boxes because I had remembered that last year they had a great selection at a great price.  Unfortunately, this year I went after North Carolina’s tax free weekend and they were woefully cleaned out.  I also had come looking for jeans for Noah who is in an awkward “between sizes” phase right now.

I parked the stroller and 3 kids outside of the dressing room, asked them to sit down and stay put (I know, I know, wishful thinking) and ran back and forth between the dressing room and the stacks of jeans for about 30 minutes.  Somewhere between waiting for a preteen to dance around in front of a mirror checking himself out, a child trapped in a stroller crying and alternately yelling angrily, and the other 3 kids playing tag loudly in the racks of clothes, I lost it. I just couldn’t take it anymore, I was starting to get a twitch and my shoulders were scrunched in stress. I had a mommy madness moment and even though it was 11:30AM and almost lunch time, I played the last card I had. I whipped out the jumbo bag of Swedish Fish I had brought for emergencies, I let Chloe dole out sticky red fish at will. When she tried to ration them and the noise level began to rise, I told her to just keep handing them out.

We finally left with a sweet Jonas Brothers t-shirt for Chloe to wear to the concert we were going to and she also got a pair of jeans.  Alex got a shirt and a pair of jeans as well and poor Noah, who spent all that time dancing in front of the mirror, ended up with a cool t-shirt but no jeans.

The kids were sticky, full of sugar and tired of being contained, so we headed to Chick-fil-A for lunch before braving Target and the school supplies, but that is another story.

If you have a good school-shopping horror story, please share it here so we can commiserate.

Tags: Chick fil A, JC Penny, Jonas Brothers, Swedish Fish, Target