Bested By BJs

I didn’t intend to take a hiatus from my blog this summer… but it’s been a couple of months since I’ve written so I suppose that qualifies as a full fledged hiatus. I figure I am long overdue for an update. For any of you that recently saw my carefully curated Facebook photos of a lovely weekend spent visiting the zoo with my children you would think my summer has been spent doing nothing but Insta-worthy family time. Please allow me to pull back the curtain and show you a glimpse of the reality that was behind those carefully curated photos. That zoo trip was an absolute nightmare. We were coming fresh off the first full five days of school in a row. The kids were absolutely beyond exhausted. We got a late start heading out. We had tantrums. We had tears. We had fighting. We had hunger pangs. And that was just from the adults. When we were in the very dark Reptile and Amphibian House and my children were distracted I contemplated slowly backing out while the kids weren’t looking and running for the hills. At one point I took a few of the kids on a longer trail to see the mooses (Meese?) And ended up losing Alex and the stroller. We eventually found him. Hiding in some overgrown garden trying not to make eye contact with us as we searched for him. When we walked by the Camel Ride area Scarlett lost her ever-loving mind when I wouldn’t let her ride one of them. Mind you, she has never in her life up until this moment wanted to ride the camels. Pick a lane kid! She was so mad and I was so desperate that as her punishment I made her stick her nose to a tree facing away from the exhibits for a time out. I literally grounded her from looking at the emus. No joke. That may be a new low for me and was definitely the most random punishment any of my children have ever received. I was just grasping for straws at that point. She’s in Kindergarten now so I guess I should also probably talk to her teacher for fear that she may struggle when they get to the part of the year where they work on animal identification. Eventually, after more of the same song and dance, we ended up calling it quits – we know when we’ve been bested – and walked past the final exhibit and just loaded everything back in the car to head for home. The kids were quick to remind us that we still had not fed them. (Nevermind the fact that I had seriously considered feeding them…to one of the larger animal exhibits.) Like every good mother of a large family, I said “Not to worry – we’ll go to our local BJ’s where I am a card-carrying member.” (For those not familiar, this is a store similar to a Costco or Sam’s Club. They have a killer tiny café that is ridiculously cheap.) Naturally we spent a ton of money in the store and definitely did not save money by stopping here to eat… but that’s beside the point. The café is strategically placed just after the checkout lanes. After we had spent an hour browsing the store buying a bunch of random things in bulk that we will never use, we stopped to get giant pretzels, hotdogs, cookies, and pop. Because that is for sure the answer to your kids’ miscreant behavior. Reward them with sweets. That’s what all the good parenting books say! It’s genuinely difficult for me to even write that sentence out of sheer embarrassment. But this literally happened. After picking up the enormous amounts of trash that are the result of a family of seven’s mealtime, we headed for the exit. Completely forgetting that you had to show your receipt to an attendant at the door in order to leave. So they could make sure that we weren’t trying to steal our bulk box of potato skins. Turns out our receipt got thrown away with our mass quantities of refuse. We stared at the receipt checker lady. She stared back. We were literally locked inside the warehouse. At this point it was roughly two hours past naptime and we had multiple nearly crying kids. Many, many bad decisions had led us to that point. We asked the attendant what we had to do to be able to get out of the store. She told us we had to go back to the guest services area where they could get us a new receipt. I kept the kids corralled while Alex went back to the store entry point. After he was gone for some time Elle, Rose, and myself all took our turns literally dumpster diving. Thinking that the receipt had to be somewhere near the top of the trash. We were there just after lunchtime and I’m fairly confident there were at least 7 pounds of mustard wiped down the sides of those trash bins. I eventually had to throw in the towel and pull my children out. It was at this point that I heard “Hello Sarah!” And I turned around to see Elle’s kindergarten teacher from our local school district. Each of my kids either had tears or mustard coating most of their skin. We literally just pulled our arms out of the trash bins. And I was just standing there looking quite dazed and confused. I pulled myself together enough to try to act like everything was perfectly fine. I think I carried on a fairly normal conversation and then we went off to try to locate Alex. It turns out it takes 12 hours for the receipts to update in their system. Thank God they have a mattress section. Because we were about to have to stay the night. After much pleading the store manager had to come out alongside Alex and they literally side-by-side had to dig through the trash until they found the receipt. I’ve never been more attracted to my husband than when I saw his hand come up out of that trash bin with that ketchup-covered receipt. Therefore freeing us from eternal damnation inside the BJ’s wholesale club. But that oversized cookie was worth it!

I tell you this story to help each of you understand that you can’t believe a word of what you see on Instagram and/or Facebook. Not that there was anything dishonest about the pictures from our zoo trip… I just didn’t post the whole story…and neither does anyone else. Your life likely isn’t worse than everyone else’s and their lives aren’t better than yours. We’re all only showing a carefully curated version of ourselves online and it’s important to remember that there’s a whole storm going on underneath that surface! Quit getting wrapped up in comparison and just live the best version of your own life – quit wishing for someone else’s!