Like herding cats: Christmas shopping with The Boy

So the other day I took The Boy on a trip to buy a Christmas gift for The Wife, because I'm clinically insane. I'm so clinically insane that I have to emphasize that fact by writing clinically insane in italics. That's how clinically insane I am.

The Wife receives numerous gifts from me this time of year, not because I'm a nice guy but because it increases my chance that she'll actually like one of them. One would think that after 10 years of marriage this whole gift-giving thing would be easier. I've found it anything but, mostly because her idea of a quality gift is either A. Nothing or B. Something practical, like socks or a mop or a gallon of milk. I find practical gifts practically ridiculous, especially as we buy gifts for one another with the same pot of money.

But I digress. Because I buy so many different gifts for The Wife, I have to go shopping on several different occasions. And because I have about five minutes of spare time per day, some of these shopping trips must double as Watch The Boy times. And on one such time we found ourselves at the mall.

I'm still trying to recover.

The Boy is a great kid. But he's three. He's male. He's active. Any shopping trip that doesn't take him to a large building filled with colorful, plastic, kid-sized objects, preferably with either moving parts and/or wheels, is mind-numbingly dull and he is not afraid to inform me of that fact. And I can't necessarily say that I disagree. If I had a perfect day, it would not involve standing for hours staring blankly at, say, women's jewelry or books or women's clothes.

I had informed The Boy that our task upon entering the mall was to purchase a gift for his mama -- one I had in mind but one that I will not tell you about because, believe it or not, she reads the blog. And when I was done telling The Boy why we were at the mall I told him again. And again. And again.

Upon entering I kept telling him.

Did it work? Not really. His task once we got there was to get dad to take him anywhere but anyplace that I could get a gift for his mom. Dad, I wanna ride the escalators. No. Dad I wanna go to the play area. Not now. Dad I wanna grab one of those weird wind spinners being displayed on that kiosk so you get trapped into talking to the overly aggressive sales guy. Definitely no. Dad I'm hungry. But you wouldn't be if you'd have eaten dinner. Dad I wanna go shoplifting. That's my job. Dad I wanna go run into that women's underpants store where I'll pick up any colorful panties I can find. Of course you do.

And when he wasn't doing that, he was pointing in some random spot, asking "what's that?"

What's what?

"That!" (Continues pointing in a random direction at nothing in particular)

What? (Now I'm frustrated)

"That!" (Still pointing)

What's what? (Much of my hair is in my fists)

"That!"

WHAAAAAAAAAAAT???????!!!! (I bang my head on the counter of the nearest Orange Julius)

Ultimately, The Boy found a series or irresistibly tempting items throughout the mall: window displays. At one store I had managed to choose a gift between moments when I had to run after him and moments when I had to keep him from breaking things and other moments when he wanted to play with his race cars on the cashier counter in front of other shoppers -- and where he found yet other irresistible yet breakable playthings. But when he discovered fake snow in the window display, he couldn't resist, and kept making a bee line for it every time I, and my team of Lipizzaner Stallions, had pulled him away to what we thought was a safe distance.

After we successfully got The Boy beyond the store's gravitational boundary, he was pulled in by another window display, this one at Victoria's Secret with its pink stuff. Then he escaped my grasp to play in the American Eagle window display. And then, despite the efforts of me and my stallions, he found another display with fake snow and, better yet, fake snowballs. I needed several pieces of herding equipment, numerous bribes and a few threats to get him out of there.

But I managed to get us out of the mall. Sure I have no dignity. And three stores will never let me return again. And I'm now the official laughingstock of Minnesota malls. But I got a gift, dammit, and that means one less time that I'll have to go through that again. On top of that, I now know how a shepherd feels. And isn't that appropriate for this time of year?



Spend your holiday at humor-blogs.com. At least it's better than fruitcake.