'Twas the Week Before Thanksgiving Eve

So the World's Most Awesome Toddler turned 2 on Friday, and as punishment to her parents all of her Georgia grandparents came to visit.  No, actually, it was fine.... just exhausting.  Hadn't seen my parents get along that well in, well, my life.  And Her Majesty certainly enjoyed being the EXACT center of attention.  She is also a recent convert to the Birthday Cake Fan Club.

   So now it's Thanksgiving Eve, and my mother has been here since The Squirt's birthday on the 18th.  She has made it her mission to completely decorate The Squirt's new Big Girl Room which includes painting a lot of furniture because we're too cheap to buy anything new and happily took hand me down furniture.  She also decided to repair the damage to the guest bathroom that my grandmother caused a good year ago and that she exacerbated.  All fine and dandy.  I think she intends to paint my upstairs hallway, too, which again, is fine.  She's good at these sorts of things and while I could do it myself, I'd prefer not to.

   However, today we took a trip out to a couple of shopping establishments because I had to buy The Squirt's new Big Girl bedding set (CUPCAKES!) and my mother needed to go to Home Depot for some things that she assures me are essential to the wellbeing of my family and the Earth and my lack of which she finds troubling (spray acrylic.  Who just keeps spray acrylic in their house at all times?).  These 2 hours of my life proved sufficient to render me more or less a hypertensive manic-depressive maniac hellbent on killing all those in my way.  Why, you ask?

   On the way to Homegoods, she tells me I have to buy new bathroom rugs because she threw out my existing rugs yesterday (and trash has since been picked up) because they weren't the correct rugs.  Then I am informed that she intends to hang a towel bar about 2 feet up from the floor in the bathroom so that my daughter can wipe her mouth on it after brushing her teeth.  Yes, because that's necessary.  Then we arrive at Homegoods, and she immediately takes off at Warp 9.9 with my toddler in hand, ignoring the fact that I'm nearly 8 months pregnant and physically unable to move that fast.  If you've never chased my mother around a home accessories or grocery store, let me tell you now that it's both aerobic and frustrating.  The key is to NEVER let her have control of the cart.  Otherwise, you spend the grocery trip filling your arms with all the things you INTENDED to put in the cart and then circling the store looking for the buggy and trying in vain to catch her long enough to put this armload of groceries into the cart so you can start that process again. The comedic properties of chasing your own grocery cart around the store as it's being driven by a maniac in sweatpants is unfortunately lost on me. It's kind of like Whack-a-Mole, only you don't get to hit her on purpose. 

   So being careful to keep from circling the sun while traveling at maximum warp to avoid unintentional time travel and having to be part of some bad Star Trek plot involving humpback whales, I managed to acquire the things I intended to buy and subsequently answer all her continuously unanswerable questions about what exact shade of purple was in the quilt set that I did not own yet.  I was also required to purchase an over-the-door hanging organizer thing because she cannot abide my purse hanging on a doorknob or a Target bag being placed on the floor until the contents are unpacked.  Oh, and a scented candle for the bathroom, which I guarantee my husband will throw away next week because scented candles give him migraines.  My total cost: $140.  She bought the kid a pink poodle purse for $4.99.

  So then we head to Home Depot, where again, she grabs the toddler and accelerates towards the exit.  Approaching the exit, she hands me the child and then despite me saying "This is the exit, the entrance is there," she zooms in through the out door, leaving us to chase behind her unable to get a cart or buggy for my 32lb ham of a child to ride in. So, this means I spent the next 30 minutes chasing her AND a toddler wearing new and exciting twinkling sneakers through Home Depot trying in vain to prevent injury to myself and/or damage to the Home Depot inventory that would require me to pay the store for the destruction.  I vetoed a $30 towel bar that I don't need or want, much to her chagrin. Suck it, lady.  After she amassed all the things that Home Depot sells that my home was teetering on the edge of self-destructing without, I was allowed to pay for the purchases while MotorMother takes my child and runs for the car like a woman currently shoplifting a turkey out of the store in her underwear.

   Did I mention that in the course of this day I had to stop at no less than 3 different gas stations until she could find the appropriate brand of cigarettes?  And I am so desperately allergic to and loathing of all things related to smoking that my soul dies a little with each stop.  If only I'd known the incantation to make a horcrux, it would have been smart on this trip.

   Finally, after we leave Home Depot I decided to acquire some lunch for everyone, and swung into McDonalds.  The Squirt got excited about "Chicken anna FRIES anna SAUCE, Mama?!?" So taking a deep breath, I barely survived the sojurn through the highly inefficient newly redesigned 2 lane drive thru system with my mother on a continuous loop about how HORRIBLE the drive thru line is and trying repeatedly to get my child to repeat the things she wanted her to say.

   When I got home, I more or less only wanted to sit on my sofa and try not to die.  But no, I was sent to Target because you see, she'd decided my bathroom curtain situation was inappropriate, so she took down ONE curtain rod from the 2 windows in my daughter's room and moved it to the bathroom window which faces a windowless side of our neighbor's house.  Since nobody except the 2.5 foot tall kid is ever naked in that room, I'd not really worried about covering the window which was apparently a sad, sad travesty in my life.   Instead of just buying another rod next time we happened to be there, it became imperative to get one with some haste because now only one window of my daughter's room was covered.  Logic defies.

   And the kicker is that SHE has a prescription for Xanax, not me.