ándale! ándale!

Anyone who knows me knows that I do not do well with crowds of people, namely crowds of people in gigantic, crowded stores that have Christmas music blaring over the speaker system. Yes, I'm talking about Walmart. I get angry, I get flustered and I can occasionally get hostile (ask the old lady that cut me off after I left Walmart one time). Tonight was no different.

To top it off, I was Christmas shopping. So as I'm dodging old ladies in motorized carts and the treacherous spears of Christmas wrapping paper that are protruding from over-stuffed shopping carts, I am trying to read Tink's six page list and decipher Evel's atrocious handwriting enough to figure out what to buy for them that they wouldn't cram into their toy boxes and never play with again. I was also trying to do all of this with a very cranky 17 month-old baby that desperately needed a N-A-P. And even though people were bizarrely nice this evening, my stress level was up. Way the hell up. Curse you Pennsylvania for not selling liquor in grocery stores.

After two grueling hours and two trips to wait in line, only to realize that I forgot stuff that I actually needed (like baby wipes for my child that had soiled himself while I was waiting in line the first time), I finally made it out, but I had one more stop before we headed home. I had to hit the new Dollar Tree.

So I changed a horribly stinky diaper, jump started the Subaru with the solenoid and made my way down the highway from Hell (A.K.A. the Selinsgrove strip) to the dark scary parking lot of the Dollar Tree.

Let me tell you, there is a completely different crowd of people that shop at the Dollar Tree. Believe it or not, I think they're even a little rougher than the Walmart crowd. The first woman I saw looked like she could have been on the '85 Bears defensive line and her husband looked like someone out of Joe Dirt. I'm not sure if there was a full set of teeth in the entire store. Freaking creepy. I wanted to walk around and see what kind of junk they had that I didn't really need but would buy because it only cost $1, but after seeing how jam packed this store was and seeing the kind of people that were wandering around unattended, I decided to just get my crap and get out while I still had some of my sanity left.

Everything was going well until I was having trouble finding accordion tubes for Nutt's stocking. It was impossible to push a cart through this tiny store that was so stuffed full of $1 goodies that it was bursting at the seams and my patience was done for. Time to give up. I rounded the corner and headed toward the checkout.

One problem. As I was on my way down the aisle, I come across two little boys, probably somewhere around the age of six. Wrestling. Yes, wrestling on the ground in the middle of the aisle. And beating each other with rolls of wrapping paper. Seriously.

I couldn't go backwards because, like Jell-O, the aisle behind me had sealed up with people. So being the kind person that I was, I said to the kids, "Excuse me." No response except for the shouts of another language as they rolled around on the ground. I tried again, "Hey kids, CAN YOU GET UP SO I CAN GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE?!" (Okay, I didn't really swear at them but I really wanted to) Still Nothing. "HEY, KNOCK IT OFF AND MOVE!" Not a freaking thing.

This was the straw that broke the camels back. I was starting to feel like I had a sore throat, I had the beginnings of a migraine from trying to refrain myself from just plowing them out of my way into the Christmas tinsel with my cart and Nutt had started crying because I yelled (mental note, gotta toughen him up like the other two so he ignores my yelling, too). So I did what I had to do.

"Andale!" They stopped and looked at me. Whoa. I totally felt powerful. So I yelled it again, this time with some hand motions that showed them I wanted them to get off of the floor and out of my way. "Andale!!" They slowly got up and I slowly pushed my cart and screaming child past them, all the while giving them my best "Mom Look" to let them know that I was pissed. That look is definitely multilingual.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like yelling at children (much). I really would have preferred to yell at their parents because they're the ones that should be publicly humiliated for letting their children act like a hoard of wild banshees in the middle of a store, but I saw no one in the general vicinity that resembled these kids enough to possibly have spawned these monsters. I'm sure if I would have found them, they wouldn't have understood my lecture anyway because there was obviously a language barrier (although, I think they may have understood a gesture or two that I felt like using). And the fact that their two young children were not in their field of site says to me that they probably wouldn't have given a crap anyway.

So I made it home without getting myself featured on the evening news because I left skid marks on two little kids that decided to have a WWE Smack Down in the middle of Dollar Tree. I'm sure if the newscasters told my back story about spending two hours in Walmart, everyone would have understood. Damn, I could have been a hero today.