Friday morning Trout tried to go out of the house in a skort that barely covered her behind, and I said "No Way" and sent her upstairs to change. She came down in another skort that was too short, so I sent her back up to change again. She immediately burst into an F5 tantrum about how I made her change from her favorite skort and now I'm making her change from her second favorite skort and I was so mean to her and she didn't have anything to wear and on and on and on. I gave some lip service to the "I know, it's hard to outgrow your favorite things" blahblahblah, but really I have no patience whatsoever about such things because really, my mom made me wear Toughskins jeans, so you have no reason to complain, kid. BigDaddyFish, however, can't stand the melodrama despair, and asked me to go to the mall and buy the kid some more shorts. I explained that I really didn't want to go do that so late in the season, since she'd wear them all of 3 times before she outgrew them, if that, and I didn't want to spend the money. He implored me to do it, and I caved, so after the bigs went to school Sunny, Nemo and I set out to the mall on a wild goose chase for shorts. For an incredibly skinny, long-legged, hard-to-fit kid. In September. When the air temperature is in the 80s, but you can buy blanket sleepers and winter coats in the stores.
We went to Sears with no luck, Children's Place where we scored a cute skirt on closeout for $6, and moved on to Gymboree. I try not to buy stuff regular price there because it's too blasted expensive, but they were having one of their Gymbucks giveaway thingys, and their clothes are at least reasonable as far as modesty (a major girl's clothes rant coming soon to a blog near you!), and since I was looking for skorts or shorts I thought I might find something on sale. I didn't, but I did find a cute corderoy skort and thin long-sleeved top that were not breathtakingly expensive and came down to her knee, so I headed to the checkout.
Next to the checkout were a couple of stacks of boxes that open in the front, three boxes high, filled with last season's socks. Sunny had brought her own money and decided she just had to have some fun socks, so we spent probably ten minutes digging in the sock bins looking for cute socks. We found some for everyone but Little Man. While we were digging, I noticed a young boy, somewhere around 15-18 months old, messing around in my diaper bag, which was hanging from the back of the stroller.
"No, no, sweetie, that's ours!" I said brightly with a big smile. He backed off and I did a quick check to make sure all my stuff was there. I glanced around but couldn't identify which woman in the store he was with, but it is a small store and I'm sure everyone there heard me. Two more times in the ten minutes we were digging through socks I had to shoo the child away, and not once did an adult come to his aid. I was kind and patient with him each time, but I was getting really irritated that a child that young was being allowed to wander around by himself and get so intimate with strangers. What if I had been a pedophile? What if I wanted one more kid to add to my brood? It's bad enough that my own kids dig around in my diaper bag and take stuff out and lose it, I don't need someone else's kid doing it, too. I myself would be mortified if one of my kids did that to someone else, and it would only take someone saying something once for me to make sure they were in my purview, most likely my hand, at all times. The fact is that I probably would have noticed it before the owner of the bag and put a stop to it myself. I did give the child's mother the benefit of the doubt, maybe she was having a bad day or whatever, but really the store is not that big, and a child that young shouldn't have been out of his caregiver's reach.
We finished with the socks and Sunny wanted to pay for her socks by herself, and while I was helping her a woman tapped me on the shoulder and said "Here, my son had this, it is yours" and handed me my sunglasses case. I thanked her and put it back in my bag, did a quick check to make sure nothing else was missing, and we left.
We went all kinds of places after that. We got a pretzel for a snack, we went to JCPenney (the best place for what I needed - I got one pair of longish bermuda shorts for $3 and a pair of uniform shorts for $9) and the Disney Store (Little Man's birthday is this week), we played at the froggie play area, and then we got in the car to come home. It was a shockingly bright day, and I opened my case to put on my sunglasses.
No glasses, just an empty case.
I immediately called Gymboree, and no one had turned in my sunglasses, or even seen them. I needed to leave soon because I had to get to the bus stop to pick up Trout and Little Man, but I grabbed Sunny and Nemo, didn't even take the stroller, and dashed into the store to look for them myself. No luck. I left my name and number and asked that they please call me if anyone came in with my very expensive, prescription sunglasses, good for no one but me. I am kicking myself that I didn't look inside the case to make sure the glasses were there when the woman handed me the case.
I checked today; no sunglasses.
I'm afraid the child either threw them in a fountain or something, or the mother found them in her stroller and assumed they were cheap kids' sunglasses (what can I say? I am a pinhead) and either kept them for her kid or threw them out. I am distraught. Yes, over sunglasses.
You see, I haven't had decent sunglasses in decades. Twice before this pair I tried to buy sunglasses, and they never did fit right, or they weren't really quite the right prescription and gave me headaches. These, these were perfect. They fit like they were specially molded for me, and I never had a problem switching back and forth between my regular glasses and my shades. I have a rotten weird astigmatism that makes it so that I can wear contacts, but I just don't see as well as I do with my glasses. I had those sunglasses 9 months - I picked them up on my way home from the hospital after having Nemo.
I'm going to miss them.