Blowout Sale or The Day I Was Nearly Arrested for Shoplifting

Since Blaine and I have taken it upon ourselves to single handedly stimulate the economy, we decided it was high time we bought Bentley some new pajamas. I was perfectly content to wait until I found some at a garage sale but Blaine came to bed last night with smoke puffing out his ears because he couldn't find any pjs for Bentley.

So today I went to the outlet mall in search of pajamas. I had a coupon for Carter's for an additional 20% off of their already reduced "blowout" prices. Sweet.

Things started heading South shortly after my arrival at the outlet mall. Ben is a boy, through and through, and something in the depths of his DNA has made it so that the simple act of walking in to a clothing store makes him start to scream in protest. I am not kidding. You could walk in the doors, he would scream, walk out and he would be fine. I anticipated this though and had crackers and cars in hand.

I made the mistake of stopping at a store on our way to Carters, so he was kind of at wits end when I had the audacity to walk in to a SECOND store in one shopping trip. He was wiggling and whining and I was shushing and making witty remarks to try to ease the social tension that comes when you have screaming kids at the store.

The problem was that I had to spend $40 in order to get my 20% off and there weren't many pajamas his size on the clearance rack. So it took a bit of time to get my priorities in order (size vs price) and figure out how to spend exactly $40 and not a penny more. This whole time the fussing was growing at an exponential rate.

There was a mom and toddler looking through the same rack of clothes that we were and I heard the toddler talking about the crying, er...screaming, little boy. Finally when that little girl had had enough she asked her mom, "Mom can you ask that lady with the little boy to leave?".

You know it's bad when the other children want you and yours to leave the store.

So I hustled, got my goods and in the checkout line started to notice a certain -- aroma. I thought I would just hurry to the car but then glanced down and noticed that Bentley was 100% covered in poop. Shorts, shirt, hands, stroller, everything.

It must have been sad to be Ivy, as the designers of Bjorns didn't really design their product with this particular situation in mind. As I was tackling the Bentley situation in the restroom I noticed that her head was dangling precariously close to Bentley's poop covered behind. I readjusted her but then noticed that I hadn't acted quickly enough. My poor, sweet, innocent baby had her brother's feces on her head.

The clothes were shot and I couldn't put them back on him, and he couldn't sit in the stroller as it also was tainted with the stuff; so I spent a few moments pondering the social repercussions of carting around naked children. Then a light bulb went off!

I just bought him new clothes! I was saved!

I have to admit that something felt a bit off as I glanced up at the security camera in the restroom and yanked the tags off of his new pajamas. I couldn't decide which was more likely; a policeman waiting outside to arrest me for theft or an FBI officer outside waiting to arrest me for child abduction (isn't that what abductors do? Take kids to the bathroom and change their outfits?), both seemed pretty legit.

I fashioned a stroller cover out of hand drying towels, washed the poop off of Ivy's head, gave Bentley one more scrubbing for good measure...stuck him in the somewhat unsanitary stroller and was on my way.

Oh and thanks to me buying garage sale clothes I made the command decision to just throw his clothes away. They were that disgusting.

Kind of gives new meaning to the term "Blowout Sale" doesn't it?