walmart tires: how i grew old

Took my Irish twins for an outing today. If that strikes you as racist, and you're Irish, I apologize. The rest of you can chill, because the Irish don't care if I use that term. So. Toby and Brynn.

To begin the tale, Brynn cut her hair yesterday. I consider myself lucky that it has taken this long. Somehow she seems to have snipped evenly around the bun I had tucked up on top of her head, resulting in a drastically thinned but still salvageable head of hair. So. I convinced her that if we had to go get a haircut, we might as well throw in an ear piercing as well, and I bought some OTC numbing cream that I thought would numb her lobes enough to make it through. Spoiler alert! did NOT work.

But back then, at lunchtime when I was young, I watched them getting their hair cut simultaneously, and I thought what a cute blog entry this would make. Brynn sitting extremely still, paranoid of scissors around her face, because I have not failed to put the fear of God in her about bad things that WILL SURELY happen if people get poked in the head with scissors and that is why little girls should never ever EVER cut their own hair again, and Toby chatting up his hairdresser, who was very concerned about the weird little kid talking like a 30 year old in her chair. It was cute, see?


Then we got the ears pierced, and spoiler alert: there was so much screaming. but still, a pretty good little outing and no frantic calls from my baby daddy who was working while my baby was hypothetically taking a nap. So we decided to keep going and get the oil changed and 2 tires replaced, at Walmart because that's how I do. Who could have told me that only 2 and a half short hours later, I would be internally begging God to send fire on us all and END this suffering? Oh, you could have? Well, I wouldn't have believed you, back then. A few questions: why isn't there a public bathroom in the TLE? I wouldn't mind sharing it with mechanics. Shoot, I'd take a port-a-potty over trekking half the store SIX times with a panicking kid who then pees a teaspoon of liquid and wants to know what a sanitary napkin is, and if she can spend her quarter on one. SIX times. And the resident genius, reading posters about fuel intake valves and looking questioningly at me, and my poor judgment in not getting those cleaned...

And then, around the 2 hour mark, when there were 20 people standing around waiting on their cars and I saw no end in sight, then they said there were only 2 people in front of me for tires. Did I shake my fist at the heavens? No, because it was being tugged frantically by someone who claimed to be seconds away from peeing in their pants. REALLY. I canceled the new tires. What is more important, living my life, in my home, with my family, or spending my remaining days on earth in the Walmart TLE, buying keychains just to keep my brain alive? I sat down, defeated, because my keys were outside somewhere, with my van, and a guy in coveralls, and our collective destinies were at his mercy.

Many, many years later, we arrived home. When I left here, I was so young, so vibrant, so naive. I remember thinking one could get tires in an hour. Ah, youth.  Goodbye, old me. Goodbye.