'Tis the Season

Ah, the holidays....growing up, this was always my favorite time of year. Of course, I have always been very close with my family, and this season just gave us an excuse to get together and share a lot of laughter (sure, there were arguments too, but those just come with the territory when a fundamentalist grandmother starts in on her liberal daughters and grandchildren....Good Times!)...

Anyway, now that I am "all grown up" with a family of my own, I was excited to start creating some holiday magic. As it turns out, that magic MUST be found only at the bottom of a glass or five of your favorite wine (mine would be riesling). My partner's mother and sister came in for Thanksgiving. On their own, they were marvelous. However, when you add their incessant craving for shopping to the mix, watch out! To be fair, we do live in a city centered on tourism, and therefore one might understand their need to "see the sights," and rid their pocket books of a few dead presidents while at it.

Being the non-shopper that I am, I did try and reason with my partner, promising him that I could get a bunch of house-work done while he took his family out shopping. On the day after Thanksgiving. Black Friday. With like a billion people. But my feeble attempts were to no avail, as he made some "logical" excuse about my need to spend time with the family.

So here is where I found my holiday issue. While in a large mall, our son managed to soak himself, rendering his very cute holiday outfit un-wearable. To top it off, the water I had placed in bottles in the diaper bag managed to succeed in its efforts to escape bottle-prison, and thus saturated everything in the bag, grandma's video camera, and the extra formula while still leaving a large pool on the ground under the stroller. Did I mention that there were at least a billion people in the mall that day? SOOO....my partner and I were off to find the nearest restroom, which was, of course, at least 5 miles away.

When we reached our much sought-after destination, we were excited to find that this mall provided 2 family restrooms (as you can imagine the looks we get when we take our son into the mens' room and there is NO baby change table...*sigh*). So, yes, we were thrilled to see 2 family restrooms; however, both were occupied. Minutes before we arrived, woman-kind must have received a signal to use the restroom as well, as what seemed to be thousands of women had descended upon the womens' room. We thought that there had to be someone famous in there - maybe even the entire cast of Days of Our Lives - to attract such a large number of ladies at the same time (ha ha...just kidding...sorry about the stereotype!). Apparently two women weren't fans of the show, though, because they jumped ship and headed to the family rooms. We arrived just after they got in line.

By this time we have a fussy baby in wet clothes, a drenched diaper bag still leaking into the stroller, and two very frantic daddies trying to make sense of it all. We were second in line, as we assumed that the two ladies in front of us were a family and needed to use the restroom for some family-related bathroom use. But what they say about "assuming" is true; when one of the family rooms finally became available, in stepped ONE of the women.

Ok. Wait a minute. Clearly I must have misunderstood the purpose of the "familyroom" concept. Here it is the holiday season, we are three very distressed people just looking for a little dryness, and there are two women who blatantly decide to cheat in the fundamental bathroom rules of order?

Eventually, we did make it into the familyroom, and we were able to salvage enough "dryness" to piece together a suitable change of clothes for our son, and we were able to sop up the remaining water and ultimately reclaim a sense of control over our lives. But only AFTER waiting for two cheaters.

And so, to those two women out there, where ever they may be, I'd like to say one thing:

"Happy freakin' Holidays!" and the teacher in us would add "Next time, it will be to the back of the line for YOU!"

I need another glass of riesling :)

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