The trip to walmart of my dreams

I had put it off too long. Going to the store. Ever since Rene' was born, it has thrown off my entire grocery store day schedule. Mainly because its rather daunting taking 3 children under the age of 5 to Wal-Mart. And having to go to Wal-Mart is a whole nother issue. I miss my great grocery stores in Colorado. But I'm stuck with Wal-Mart. Poor Andy, when he was making his lunch this morning and I had the refrigerator door open, looking for some breakfast, he said "Its slim pickins around here". I felt bad. So I decided if we went to the store right after breakfast, at least there wouldn't be a bunch of people there to disrupt. So we were off around 8:20am. I loaded all 3 of them up in the extra large cart. That would be the one with 2 seats for older children and one for baby. You need a license to drive those things. Anyway, I dug out 10 pennies from my purse and gave them both 5. I told them that whatever they had left at the end of the trip they'd get to put in the new donation contraption. You know those things that have creative ways of making your coins fall into the donation bucket. Well, there's a new one. Anyway, I explained that if they disobeyed, poked their baby sister, or fought, they'd have to pay me a penny. Zak ended up with 4 and Paige, well she must have dropped a few along the way because she only had 2 and I had only taken 1 from her. We were in and out of there in 45 minutes. And oh the joy of watching the pennies spiral around the big black funnel. Even Rene' was smiling. Call it lucky, whatever, I know its not due to my parenting skills - just my copying skills. If you don't have the book Creative Correction , run to your nearest Barnes and Noble or library. I actually felt like an "in control" mother this morning.