electric boogaloo

Shopping for dresses with two little angry people in a tiny dressing room is bad. Don’t ever do it. If it comes down to that or buying something off the rack randomly, please do that instead. Really, I mean it. Because no matter how cute the dress is that you end up choosing, you’ll look so exhausted when you wear it to the event that the cuteness will be negated.

To be fair, Nicolaus actually wasn’t an angry person. He was kind of the opposite of angry. He was more like giddy. Or high.

We made a deal on the drive to the mall: as long as he was being really really good and sweet and easy going during this boring awful mall trip, I would answer every natural science question he could think of. He was floored by the awesomeness of this offer. After a quiet minute he said, “Mama? Right now I have this feeling like you? Are the most wonderful person in the whole world.” He sounded as surprised as I was.

“Wow! I am the most wonderful person in the world?”

“Well, I mean I just feel like that right now,” Haha mom, don’t let it go to your head.

Our deal worked beautifully. I dragged him all over the mall and he pelted me with one question after another, which I mostly was able to answer. During all those years in school when I was ignoring math and health and government and diagramming sentences, I was reading books about animals and stuff. So now I can’t balance my checkbook or remember what kidneys are for or whatever but by golly, I can answer a four year old’s life science questions.

So by the time we were in the dressing room at Macy’s, we’d been at the mall for an hour and a half and he still wasn’t angry at all. In fact he was delighted to wander through the dress racks and touch all the dresses (”Stop touching the dresses!” — “I’m just pretending I’m in a forest and these are like the plants and I’m woaaahhh! Getting all tangled up! Help!” — STOP TOUCHING THE OMG DRESSES). He was having a lot of fun while I pushed the umbrella stroller and picked up the toys Graham kept throwing down and dodged in and out of dresses, keeping them all out of the baby’s reach and yet somehow within MY reach which isn’t easy I hope you know. Especially once you have an armload of heavy dresses draped over one arm because sales people nowadays? Are able to make more on their underground gambling operation, where they make security-cam bets on whether I’ll drop everything before I make it to the dressing room, than they make on commissions.

We stuffed ourselves and all the dresses into a dressing room. Nicolaus was delighted to be in the dressing room. Because in the dressing room there are like these cool mirrors that fold out and it’s cool! Because all his friends are in there and oh gosh Mama I’ve been invited to a party and I have to go now!

He folded himself up in the hinged 3-way mirrors, which was cute and everything except that I couldn’t see what I was trying on like, at all. Every time I asked/told/demanded/threatened turtle confiscation for him to PLEASE oh my GOD open the mirror so I could see the dress and either decide it looked awful or decide it looked perfect but cost way too much, he wanted to discuss it. “But why can’t I just stay in here with the mirrors closed? Can’t you use this instead?” He pointed to the 1/2″ strip of brushed metal edging around the side of the mirrors.

“No. I can’t use that.”

“Why not? It’s pretty shiny…”

“Just. Open. The. Mirror.”

“I can just like peek out and tell you if that dress looks good or not?”

“Nicolaus. OPEN IT.”

“Okay, well what if we like take turns? Like I can use it all to myself for a few minutes, then you can use it for the next few minutes, then it will be my turn again. How about that? And it’s my turn first because I’m already wrapped up in here with all my friends, and they kind of like want me to stay.”

This happened over and over and over and over. So there were two angry people in the dressing room, but Nicolaus wasn’t one of them.

So: Dress shopping, two little kids, never do it. I don’t even know how long it took — four hours? fifteen minutes? But time passed, and I managed to catch enough quick mirror glimpses of myself to choose a nice dress. Then we still had to go down to the children’s section and find something nice for Graham to wear. I gathered everything up and found the elevator and went down and ding! the doors opened and there was a big sign advertising free fucking childcare for while you shop.