Date night at Walmart

It has been a rainy week up at the farmette.  Swimming lessons are over and school is in full swing.  Scrappy Doo of course runs to the bus every morning with a smile on his face and returns in the same state, but Prince and James Dean are a little weary and missing their friends in the city.

My mommy guiltometer is registering a 9.5 since I promised them a Mayberry existence up here with ponies and puppies, so I start thinking of ways to turns those frowns upside down.   More animals are out at this point since the chicken Taj Mahal is not ready yet and the fencing is not up for wooly four legged friends.

I've got it!  Let's have a Halloween party in the barn and invite city friends and new friends.  We will turn the second floor of the barn into a Haunted House and the front yard into a graveyard.  It will be awesome!! Once again I open my mouth before my brain has had a chance to really think this thing through, but now there is no way out.

The kids are stoked. Prince has a hundred ideas, which will cost a few thousand dollars each.  I nix all of them.  I am actually kind of a control freak when it comes to parties.  I love to throw them and can't tolerate stupid ideas, aka ideas that are not mine. The only person I would probably allow to take over a party would be a certain Swiss friend of mine who can turn water glasses or a couple of rolls of toilet paper into the most beautiful centerpiece you have ever seen.  Bitch.

Anyway, the kids are all in a frenzy about having this party. They each want to invite about ten kids from the city.  Some of these kids I don't even think they ever spoke to at school but whatever.  I have to slow them down a bit because a bunch of five, eight and ten year old aren't going to be driving themselves up here so there will be parents and siblings coming as well and everyone will be sleeping over and using our one and a half baths.

I say one and a half baths not because there is one shower and two toilets but because one of toilets will only accommodate pee.  No crapping allowed.  The toilet stopped really flushing about a year ago.  I told the husband I was going to replace it myself thinking that would motivate him to do it, but it only illicited his WTF look and a cocky "Go ahead."  So needless to say, there is still only one toilet you can defecate in and inevitably some kid will end up pooping in the pee only toilet and that will leave us with one toilet.

They each agree on three city friends.  I of course have to invite some of my BFFs as well.  It will be a tight squeeze, but hopefully the kids can sleep in the barn and I will just lace the brownies with some Imodium to cut back on the toilet use.

I spend the entire next day on Pinterest looking for Haunted House ideas and am now as excited as the kids.  I promise them a trip to Walmart on Friday after school so we can start purchasing some decorations.

Friday rolls around and I tell the husband we are going to Walmart if he wants to come and he does. The kids and I immediately head for the Halloween section which is stocked to the hilt. The husband mutters something about plastic junk and goes in search of a snack.

"Mommy, can we get a smoke machine?"

"Of course we can Prince.  What kind of Haunted House would it be without a smoke machine!"

"How about this 7 foot tall zombie?"

"You betcha James Dean. And don't forget the tombstones with the dead bodies coming out"

Within about 10 minutes the cart is full and I am starting to worry about how much this shindig is going to cost me.  We haven't even gotten to the refreshments part of it.  I suck it up though because this has to be a kick ass party. I want all the new kids coming over to see what a cool mom I am so they will want to hang out here when they are teenagers and not drive around drinking beer with my babies.

We head over to the doll aisle in the toy department in search of cheap baby dolls we can dismember and put into jars of formaldehyde.  This is an aisle I have never walked down at Walmart before.  It is very pink and glittery.  No luck in finding baby dolls.  Barbie just won't be realistic enough.  The boys want to cut a Dora the Explorer doll up for this prop but I am fearful of scarring one of Scrappy Doo's little kindergarten classmates.

The boys are now bored and I need to go get some milk and cereal so I send them off with the husband who is munching on BBQ Pringles and needs a coffee to wash it down.  They all come find me about 15 minutes later with McDonald's Frappaccinos (yes of course there is a McDonald's in the local Walmart), some fishing lures (because the husband and Prince went fishing with our Amish Eldin and are now hooked...get it),  "The Avengers" DVD, and what appears to be a rifle.

I now give the husband MY WTF look.  "What?  It's a BB gun.  Prince is going to pay for it with his allowance."

"Yeah  Mom," Prince says sucking on his 500 calorie iced coffee.

Now, to fully comprehend the 180 that has occurred in my approach to parenting, we must go back about 6 years to when Prince was 4 years old.  He had happily spent his first few years absolutely absorbed with "Thomas the Tank Engine" and all things PBS.  He had never shown any interest in "shooting things" as I used to refer to guns, not wanting him to even know the name of theses horrible vehicles of violence.  Water guns in our home were water squirters and did not remotely resemble guns.  Oh, and the only sugar he had was in the watered down organic apple juice he drank.

I looked on in horror at mothers in the playground who would let their little thugs play with toy guns while swigging Capri Suns.  Surely I could teach them a thing or two about parenting.  Then I had James Dean.  Before he could even speak he was running around with gun shaped sticks, rolling his R's like a native Spanish speaker whilst making the sound of a machine gun.

By the time we came upstate, the kids had an entire arsenal of Nerf guns in my attempt to get them to go outside and run around. The husband even slunk in one day trying to hide the 22 he decided to buy himself.  I made him swear he would never tell the kids about it.

I soon realized though from the number of "My favorite animal is the one on my plate" T-shirts I had seen, that hunting is a big thing around here.  Probably most of the kids my kids are going to be playing with have guns in their homes, and it was time my kids knew about guns and more importantly, gun safety.

I agreed to let the husband take them outside to shoot the 22 one day.  When he yelled upstairs, "Who wants to go outside and shoot a gun?" you have never seen three boys move faster.

Surprisingly, James Dean is not all that interested in shooting the gun.  Scrappy Doo has a couple turns, but Prince LOVES it and is a pretty good shot.

It is dark by the time we leave Walmart with $400 worth of Halloween decorations, three out of control caffeinated boys with orange mustaches from the red dye in the Pringles, and a brand new BB gun.  We head home to watch "The Avengers" and eat popcorn out of our favorite bowl.