Sometimes You’ve Just Gotta Laugh

July 13, 1982

There I was, in the summer of 1982, a 30 year old mother of four kids under the age of five. Derek was 4 years, 9 months. Adrienne was just shy of 2 years. Grant was 16 months and Zachary was all of 12 days.

I’d been home from the hospital for 8 days following Zack’s birth and for those 8 days we’d all been holed up at home. Traveling anywhere with 4 small children was without a doubt a daunting task even for someone as capable as I was, but after 8 days anything seemed possible and out we ventured to purchase Kindergarten school supplies for Derek. Now Derek was legally, though in hindsight probably not socially or emotionally old enough to go to Kindergarten. But given the child–parent ratio at home, we had made the executive decision that he was going, ready or not!

It took me ten minutes to get everyone in their car seats, belted in, goldfish and bottles distributed, ten minutes driving time, and another ten minutes to get everyone out of their car seats, unbelted and repositioned into shopping carts and strollers, before finally walking through the automatic doors of Payless.

Derek was assigned the task of pushing an empty cart so I’d have somewhere to put our purchases. Adrienne pushed Grant in the stroller and Zack was in the bottom of the cart that I was pushing in his car seat (by 1982, they’d come up with a car seat that could go from the car to the real world – not easily, but it was possible). After picking up the school supplies, attention spans were waning, and we were on our way to the toy department where everyone would be rewarded for their good behavior.

As we rounded the corner into the toy aisle, I heard a loud crash behind me. I looked back to see that Derek had taken the corner a tad too close and had run his cart into an end of aisle pyramid of at least 300 16 ounce bottles of shampoo. His little heart had clearly stopped beating and his face was as white as a sheet as he waited for me to do whatever he thought I was going to do. To everyone’s surprise (including mine) I burst into hysterical laughter as a clerk was on her way down the aisle to assess and clean up the mess. Derek apologized, I apologized, and neither Adrienne nor Grant knew quite what to do. The clerk was silent.

We decided to cut our losses, pay for the school supplies and return home which we did without further ado and a great feeling of accomplishment, logistically and as a parent, who in this instance could see the humor inside the bigger picture.