going postal

"I'll sell some stuff on Ebay," I think. "I'll sell some stuff and I'll just order a pickup from a postal worker and it's like RAINING MONEY." "Maybe I'm an optimist," I think.

Fast forward through 7 days of cackling "Dance, my minions, dance," as the bids came in. Now push play, hurry, you're too far if you're already at the part where I am crying at the post office, rewind STOP. I realize I can't do my normal digital postal approach because I have to have USPS boxes or something and I think, "I'll just take the kids to the post office. How bad could it be?"

Photo by Shelley Paulson

Listen, new moms and drunk moms and moms who forget a lot of things, it can be so bad. Don't take your kids places. Stay in your house. Anyway, I was all excited because I bought this rolling shopping bag thing and I was excited to use it and all of the children were excited as well, so they started punching each other and pulling the straps off the bag and also just deliberately crushing orange crackers in the rug, because that is an always thing. I took possession of the bag and made some threats and we were off. It took 8 minutes to get to the post office, during which time I answered 14,000 questions about the postal service, stamps, Ebay and the government and a couple of curve balls about Minecraft.

"Listen," I tell my offspring, "It might be crowded in here and we might have to stand in line so just stay with me and don't crash into people, look where you're going and don't climb on things and try to respect people's space and don't touch anything and don't pee in your pants and don't be loud."

I once read a study or maybe just a headline of a study or maybe it was on a sitcom, who knows, the point is that young children have a tendency to hear selectively and tend to filter out negatives, so instead of saying, "Cain, don't hit your brother in the head with a rock," you should say, "Cain, do you think you could throw that rock in the river? You're so strong, I bet with teamwork you and Abel could throw some rocks real far and then we'll have ice cream!" 

And that study might be on to something, because they did.all.the.things. While they were crashing into people and fighting and trying to get inside priority mail boxes and climbing into hazardous waste containers, I was trying to figure out which box I needed, and how the what you're supposed to do, and the line was in front of us and behind us, all just grown people who know how to ship things and not bring hellions into the post office. By the time we were second in line, my Michelle Duggar vibe was wearing off and I was handing out some pretty intense eye threats and also sweating a LOT. The lady behind me asked kindly, "Is your husband deployed?" In retrospect, I should have lied. "Yes," I should have said. "He's deployed, and boy are these kids wild. Army life, am I right?" But I didn't, I just told the truth and sweated a lot more.

We got to the counter just as Tristan almost successfully broke into the glass Breast Cancer Awareness display case. "Uh, you need to go over there and do blah blah blah," said the clerk, who had no pity for fools acting like this was the UPS store where they tape your boxes for you and smile and tell a poor fake Army wife what to do. I gave 10 seconds thought to making a run for it, but the fear of getting bad feedback on Ebay made me stay the course.

Out we went into the lobby, where I taped boxes and ignored small people committing federal offenses while Toby, in repeated attempts to be helpful, said things like "Man, this must be stressful," and "You're so sweaty..." and "So, Rhode Island is an island, huh? Interesting."

Finally I had it all packed and taped and made some pretty direct statements to my constituents about what would never happen again while we were in our second round of line waiting. Again, they did not listen. Or more specifically, the smaller ones did not listen. Toby tried some generic pep-talking and R2 just obsessively pointed at the Spiderman postage posters while the other two tried out their audition tape for Supernanny.

"Okay," says the lady, "This box costs about $1000 to ship because of blah blah blah" and I just handed her my card like, "Girl, please."

On the way out Toby offered to carry the cart and ended up bludgeoning me in the forehead pretty solidly. I stumbled to the car, sweaty bangs sticking to my bruised and possibly bleeding head, while Brynn excitedly requested either ice cream or toys as our next stop, on account of their good behavior. I would have laughed but it was too painful.