Auto Care and all that entails ...

So the car needed to be fixed.  Simple enough, cars need to be fixed every day.  Ours needed a serpentine belt, an oil change and tire rotation. Hour and a half, in and out, no problem ... except ... Julie and I only have one car.  Julie had to work and we are setting out on a little road trip tomorrow.  That meant Me, three kids under 3 years of age and Firestone Auto Care.  To my advantage, they recently opened a new Firestone in the same parking lot as Concord Mills Mall.  So the plan ... drop Julie at the church, drop the car off, trek the 1/4 mile across the parking lot, GET MORE COFFEE, visit the play place, see the fish at Bass Pro Shop, maybe have lunch and go back to pick up the car.  So simple.

I packed the diaper bag.  Diapers for Zadie, Pull-ups for Zane, Wipes, extra outfits, Goldfish, Puffs, toys, 4 apple juice sippy-cups, 1 apple juice bottle, food for Zadie, spoons, bib and gum (for crowd control).  We were well stocked and on our way.  A few minutes down the road Julie asked, "Did you get the double-stroller?".  We were well stocked, but evidentially not completely stocked ... back to the house.

After that brief inconvenience we were on our way once again.  Julie was dropped off.  The belt for the car was not in stock, but easily gotten.  Price was in line with my expectations.  Good, time for the mall. "Daddy I have to go pee-pee" says Zoe.  And of course her echo, Zane, chimed in "Daddy I have to go pee-pee too."

I need to stop here and paint a picture for you.  For this trip I blew the dust off of our double jogging stroller.  The width of most retail doors is 36".  The wheel base on our double jogging stroller is 35.9999".  The bathroom at Firestone is a unisex, 60" x 60" room, with a peculiar, rather unpleasant smell.  The only way I can explain the scene within the bathroom is to have you picture a revolving door, but replace the door with a large jogging stroller.  To move from the toilet to the sink, you must pivot the stroller to the left.  To get to the paper towels, pivot to the left again.  To coordinate the movement, everyone must work in unison, which does not come even close to falling in the twins vocabulary.  But we managed to perform the bathroom waltz not once but twice, Zoe being successful, but not so much for Zane.

To the mall.  Uneventful to the play place, except the Starbucks that I had been craving for an hour, closed and I had to settle for what Cinnabon passes off as coffee.  But I digress.  Zoe and Zane of course enjoyed playing, but my focus was on Zadie.  The mall was not open yet, so the play place was empty and I was able let Zadie crawl around without a fear of being trampled (at least by strangers; Zoe and Zane are another story).  Zadie is the kind of baby that would make you want 15 more kids.  If she cries, she is hungry, tired, stuck (a new one since she has become mobile), or was just run over by one of her locomotive- like siblings.  I put her down in the middle of the play place and she spent the next half an hour moving form one attraction to the next just exploring, smiling, laughing and looking around to make sure I was watching her pull herself up to a standing position (and once again laughing when she realized that I was indeed watching).  How lucky are we, that in this time, that has brought many new stresses, we are blessed to have an even-keeled, low maintenance, angel of a baby.

A dirty little secret.  Well, not so dirty I guess, but still something no one knows about me.  I like it when my children stop people in their tracks.  This may happen with all kids, but I am going to pretend that it is only my kids because I am their father and I can do that.  It started with Zack.  When he was a baby, people stopped us all the time and said how cute he was.  He was curly haired, fair skin and bright blue eyes.  We were stopped with the twins all the time, but they were twins and somewhat of a spectacle just in their numbers.  But once again with Zadie, people just stop and stare.  This happened half a dozen times today and the truth is, I liked it.  So there.

As we were walking to Bass Pro Shop I realized something.  Zane is following right in Zach's footstep with his curiosity.  Zane's new favorite thing to say is, "I've got a question."  He never follows that statement with a question, but he has heard his brother say it so much that it is now ingrained into his lexicon.  But he does have questions. He wants to know what everything is.  If he follow in Zach's path, right now it is what everything is, next it will be what is it for and then how does it work.  As I said in Oh yeah ... I was going to write about the kids, while questions can get a bit overwhelming and time can not always be made to answer, I pray he never stops asking them.


The other thing that I observed is how the marketing machine driving our society has claimed another victim in my young Zoe.  For her, it's the Disney Princesses.  In Bass Pro Shop she was collecting anything pink and Princess.  At one point she had a Princess tackle box, two princess outdoor kits (sunglasses and what not), a princess fishing rod and a pink butterfly net, going on about her "birfday" coming up.  Our house couldn't fit all of the stuff she has asked for, for her "birfday".  This isn't unique to Bass Pro Shop either.  She came up to me in Target the other day with half a dozen Barbie Dolls in tow.  The other thing she likes to do is find spare change, show it to me and tell me that these are, "pennies fo pwincesses".


As we were leaving Bass Pro Shop I heard the familiar "Daddy I have to go pee-pee," of course from Zoe AND her echo.  This time we had a little more room to spread out, which has its advantages and disadvantages.  Zoe took one stall, Zane took another and I set up camp at the diaper changing station.  I changed Zadie then went to help Zane.  He had shed his shorts, diaper, shoes and was straddling a toilet trying to do his business, wanting "pwivacy".  So I set off to help Zoe.  She was done and wanting to get dressed again.  I helped her and turned to go back to Zane, but he was gone.  He decided the toilet was not for him and had wandered over to the kids urinal; sans anything on his bottom half.  The next event remains a bone of contention between Zane and I.  I did not see him go pee-pee, but he adamantly told me, over and over and over (and over and over), until I gave up, that he did in fact have a successful trip to the urinal (he didn't).  I washed Zane's hands.  As I was washing Zoe's hands, I turned to look for Zane and found him, head under a stall, looking at someone trying to use the bathroom.  How embarrassing (for everyone involved).  I grabbed Zane washed his hands and got out of that bathroom as fast as humanly possible, taking only a minute to chuckle at my children's absolute fear of the XLerator hand drying system (they are absolutely terrified of how loud they are and for some reason it amuses me).

One more stop at Books-A-Million to peak through the discount bins.  I found three Illustrated Classics that will be great for Zach and of course Zoe found an armful of books, for her "birfday".

Back across the parking lot, where it was much hotter than it was an hour and a half ago, when we made our first foray across the asphalt.  I paid the bill and one more time heard the now all-to-common chorus of "Daddy, I have to go pee-pee" (maybe 4 sippy-cups of juice was too many).  The bathroom was just as small and much to my chagrin had not been relieved of that unpleasant odor.

In the car, everyone exhausted, but great prospects for naps on the horizon.  All in all, a good day.