URGENT DELIVERY: Trapped @ Wal-Mart...Slo-west checker EVR!!!!

So began the frantic text message I sent to Charlie Brown on Tuesday.

Yes...I am quite aware of my profession of being and anti-Wal-Mart shopper has just been deemed hypocritical - but I swear it was an emergency of convenience.

The rest of the text read:

Plz get P (or some other such initial that denotes our son) @ M's!!! (Daycare provider who closes at 5:30p.m.)

Time: 5:20p.m.

At that point, I had honest to goodness been. in.. LINE... FOR.... 30 MINUTES!!

I kid you not, folks.

And it wouldn't have been so bad, except that, in the Loveland Wal-Mart my cell provider gets no bars. So I couldn't call M and tell her I was running late. Instead I entered my msg, waited until a single bar appeared as I queerly angled my hand, hoping for reception, and dubiously hit send to Charlie Brown's phone. When the chime that the message had been successfully sent rang out, I declared victory.

As I glimpsed at the checker, and her ohmygoodness 5 rings on each of her 10 fingers and bracelets up to her elbows, I realized why she'd accurately been described in my frantic text as THE SLOWEST CHECKER E.V.E.R: she was completely, freaking weighted down! I mean the sheer amount of nickel she was wearing had to have weighed in at 10 lbs, at LEAST!

It was perfect. The abso-frickin-lutely perfect cherry on the top of my already crazy day.

Let's do a backwards Seinfeld-esque recap of the day to fully capture the insanity of this moment:

Reason why we were at the Loveland Wal-Mart - because LMNOB had OT with BT the OT at an irregularly scheduled date/time b/c she had been gone the week before, and last week was ROUGH like the black substance that hey, wouldn't you know, is a diamond in that there hunk. Really rough and I was really RAW. At the end of said OT session, I needed a few grocery items for dinner and LMNOB was hungry, "because we didn't get snack yet." And I, in the stunned aftermath of seeing LMNOB blankly stare and disengage (read: finally showed the behavior that I always have had concerns about, but have not been able to duplicate in the presence of any person such as her teacher, BT the OT, etc, and thus I've always diminished those concerns to the less obtrusive "nagging doubts" that float through my head) in the presence of BT the OT, who later said, "Perhaps we aren't covering all of LMNOB's issues?" decided (DUMBLY) to hit up the promised convenience of the all in one shopping Wal-Mart boasts. Dumb.

But let's back up once more - upon arriving, late (a lady from Parks and Rec fell down the stairs next to my office and the Boss and I had run to help her...along with 20 million other City employees...oh, wait, we don't have that size of population, let alone staff... you know what I mean...and I was about 15 minutes late as a result of that), to M's - I see LMNOB is not readied to go to her OT session, as was previously discussed. No...she is playing quite gleefully in the sprinklers, with the other daycare kids in their swimsuits. Sooooooo, after M apologized profusely, we dried and dressed LMNOB up, and headed off to OT, even later than we'd started out as. Quick call to the receptionist to let her know we were running late, but. We. WOULD. Be. THERE.

Prior to that? A relatively calm 6 hours of work.

Before that, though, had been a morning of chaos and calamity. The weird SID-related-I-hate-transitions-phenomenon manifest itself by way of the clingy, fit-throwing, separation anxiety - oh how I love this one, makes me feel completely inadequate and all sorts of guilty. Ducked on out of there and arrived at work 30 minutes late. Thank God for small miracles, as 1.) the Boss is a flexible mama too, and 2.) she was at a meeting anyway.

It is the days like these that I think, my life is truly stranger than fiction.

And thank heaven for chocolate, fine wine and a hot bath.